This was a hard list to make because I feel a little guilty about having to include some of these films. If you read my reviews for a few of them, you’ll be a bit surprised to see them here. There have only been one or two truly fucking awful movies this year, that I’ve seen anyway, so most of this list is reserved for the ones that have those glimmers of specialness or great ideas or performances but still manage to shit all over themselves one way or another.

The only movie that isn’t on this list that maybe should have been is Elysium. To the extent that I usually reserve my “Worst” list not for objectively BAD movies but for true disappointments, Elysium fits the criteria better than most. That said, it is ousted (narrowly) by other films I simply have more ire about. Maybe it’s because Elysium being disappointing is just kinda sad and maybe just a bit natural. Neill Blomkamp is no Rian Johnson, so maybe it’s understandable to flop on the sophomore outing.

Anyways. This was another year more about underrated films and false controversies than it is about thirty superhero movies that are shitty because of compromises or too many people in the productions not giving a shit. In fact, most of the big movies this year were at least solid. A lot of lists include stuff like Star Trek: Into Darkness and probably 47 Ronin but neither of those hate their audiences or totally succumb to their unfortunate flirtations with stupidity.

If you like this Worst list, you can always read the ones from last year, 2011, and 2010. Just try to ignore all the broken image shit. Not sure what’s up with that.

10. The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug

My review.

The problem with The Hobbit is that Peter Jackson thinks he’s Steven Spielberg but he’s really George Lucas. Taking everything tangible and special about The Lord of the Rings and recoating it with gaudiness, silliness, and tonally challenged narrative is not the best way to catch lightning in the bottle twice. It’s very, very weird to watch the history of the Star Wars prequels and all attendant problems (the differences are matters of degree, really) basically repeat itself with this generation’s most beloved big budget fantasy franchise. But it’s happening. I hate it, but it is. Still, putting The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on this list feels like beating your kids.

9. The Evil Dead

My review.

The Evil Dead is a beautiful movie which satisfies on some visceral levels but completely fails the call to arms made by The Cabin in the Woods. Not only doomed to redundancy for being a remake that adds absolutely nothing, The Evil Dead also haplessly plays into every one of the horror stereotypes that the original film helped invent. It’s tired. It’s weak. And whatever it does try to twist around or change is stupidly shallow. Comparing this film to Star Trek: Into Darkness actually works nicely because most would say they are guilty of the same sins, but Star Trek actually is trying to do something with its commentary and retreading and therefore makes itself, if not necessary by any stretch, not redundant.

8. The Great Gatsby

My review.

I’ll always have an affection for this pompous, ambitious mess. That said, it’s still a massively self-indulgent movie with deplorable social messaging and a sense of vacant irresponsibility that could be a commentary if not for all the glitz and glam with which it’s all executed. What really kills me about this movie, though, is that it doesn’t simply end when Gatsby dies, as it should, but keeps going on for 15 minutes of increasingly insulting stupidity. I was softer on it when I first saw it, but I’d still stand by it being an enjoyable mess of a movie. I still think it’s a fairy tale, but it’s the bad kind that even Disney tries not to make any more.

7. The Host

My review.

I really like Andrew Niccol’s sensibilities. I am always down to gush over Gattaca or defend even In Time‘s excesses. In some ways, The Host feels a natural extension of In Time‘s thin scifi parable about pretty people in trouble. Except every thing about the writing, characterization, and narrative traction of this film is dumb, dumb, dumb. I doubt even Niccol cared about whether or not the plot or backstory make any kind of sense. He probably just liked the idea of a race of parasitic organisms who conquer planets by being totally nice and making life better for everybody. I mean, I like that idea. Utopia as Dystopia and all. Too bad The Host does nothing interesting with, content instead for its bored leads to make goo goo eyes at each other in beautiful landscape shots.

6. The Way Way Back

No review.

I watched this movie for two reasons: Sam Rockwell and Jim Rash. Unfortunately, Jim Rash and his cowriter/director Nat Faxon opted to basically make Little Mister Sunshine and the results are almost uniformly terrible. Rockwell is great, of course, bringing the movie’s only real dose of humanity to what is essentially a very cynically twee movie about forced emotional bullshit because some unlikable fourteen year old dude hates everything forever because his step dad is kind of a dick. It’s a very contrived movie, and poor Liam James is stuck with a character that is impossibly possessed of all the worst qualities infused in him by the unresolved issues of the writers. Much as I love Jim Rash in Community, I have to lose some respect over this crap. Of course, it’s the indie darling of 2013 with people touched by its honest look at the insecure idiocy of adults instead of their quirky, knowing kids. What the fuck ever. Steve Carrel and Rockwell are the bright spots that make this one sort of watchable, that keep it viable for my Worst list rather than making it truly dismissible.

5. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

No review.

City of Bones manages to distill every bad thing about self-indulgent, wish fulfillment fan fiction. The film has some love in it, with some decent action and horror elements, but it’s entirely too up its own ass to not be awful. It’s loopiness is really the most entertaining thing about it. Awkward incest subplots, irresponsible gender politics, and the kind of non-sequitur WTF dialogue where two characters will seem to be having entirely separate conversations. The fact that none of the badly written book’s bad writing got fixed for the script is actually surprising.

4. Jack the Giant Slayer

My review.

This movie is why Bryan Singer returning to X-Men is not something I can really get excited about. For all the credit that guy gets, he’s made more shit than gold. Jack the Giant Slayer does no one in this movie any favors. The only actor who comes out of it completely untarnished is Stanley Tucci, whose teeth are basically the MVP of the entire fucking thing. Jack is probably the pinnacle of the soulless big-budget movies of 2013. Or it would be if The Lone Ranger didn’t exist.

3. The Lone Ranger

No review.

The Lone Ranger marks the first time I’ve included a movie I didn’t finish on one of my lists. I turned off The Lone Ranger out of exhaustion and disgust about 2 hours in. I’m really not sure if that should have disqualified this movie from my Worst list. It’s something to think about. It was more than enough time for The Lone Ranger to tell its silly, boring, and unnecessary story, though. But of course, the movie asks you for something like 2 and a half hours. One must draw the line somewhere. The fact that movie like this gets made with a $200mil+ budget (or whatever the hell amount) is a fascinating thing in and of itself. The only good thing about this movie is William Fichtner and the occasional “so bad/wat it’s entertaining” moments that come from a movie where it seems like everybody involved kinda knows they should be ashamed of it. I like Gore Verbinski and I like all these actors. I don’t mind Johnny Depp playing Tonto, but they didn’t have to rehash 100 years worth of bad stereotypes to do it.

2. Oz the Great and Powerful

My review.

Oz the Great and Powerful is a beautiful movie with many interesting ideas which nonetheless begins to spin out of control in the third act. It never makes the Witches into real characters. It doubles down on the meaningless saccharine lessons, which are rendered so by being repetitive and poorly earned. It is a movie that gets worse the more you think about it. It’s a shallow, surface experience where the beautiful imagery and slapstick humor lull you into a pleasant mood while it systematically glosses or retrogrades its way through its characterizations and themes. Oz the Great and Powerful is a staggeringly bad film in this sense and one of the best examples of the disappointment which usually contributes to placing a film on this list.

1. Gangster Squad

My review.

Gangster Squad remains the most hateable, disappointing, and embarrassing movie of 2013 by far. It’s funny because I saw this film almost a year ago, it was one of the first 2013 films I saw in theaters, and I knew then that it would be a strong contender for worst of the year. What makes it worse than Oz is that it is so pretentious it stings. The only embarrassing thing about Oz is its bad gender politics. That movie just wants to be rascally and charming and in spite of its odious flaws, it does accomplish that much. Gangster Squad thinks that it is a seminal crime epic, and it wants you to know that every five minutes. It wants you to be like “this is better than L.A. Confidential!” but anyone who thinks that is an asshole. This movie is that guy at the table who insists on trying to talk genre history with you but hasn’t watched a movie made before 1990. In life, there are few things worse than an ignoramus prancing around with the obnoxious certainty that they are just so fucking cool. That is what Gangster Squad is. If it was a person, I’d punch it in the face.

This was another great year for movies. The best since 2007. It makes 2012, which was pretty good, look like shit. Unlike most years, where there’s usually a handful of truly great movies and a whole bunch you have room in your heart to love, 2013 was one where a masterpiece or two seemed to come out every month. Even months that are traditional dumping grounds for movies no one gives a shit about.

Occasionally there’s a theme for the movies that come out. Or at least, I find one that I notice in them. I’m not sure 2013 has a theme except for just how solid and even the quality has been. Some people are learning lessons from the huge, lazy productions that made no money in the last couple of years. Even movies like Star Trek: Into Darkness, written by hacks, manages to run off a competent screenplay. But don’t worry, it’s not on my Top 15 list.

Now that you’re sitting down again, please feel free to have a look at previous years’ lists after you’ve read this one. It can be kind of fun to look back at my picks and then bug me about how I’ve changed my mind about some of them. People are fallible and distance yields insight. I do these reviews, and these lists, to have fun with the practice of criticism. It keeps the pencil sharp and, more importantly, it keeps me writing.

In some ways, this was one of the least agonizing Top 15 lists I’ve done since I started doing them. Last year was torture by comparison. It could be because I missed many of the big prestige films that started coming out around October. It could be because I am just way more solid about my love for these films. Because I did miss so many, I think 2013 may be another year where I look back and feel the strong desire to shuffle things around. 2008 was like that, what with Synechdoche, New York and There Will Be Blood not featuring on my list at all.

Hopefully it interests you, dear reader, that I’ve picked several films for this list which can only be considered controversial choices. 2013 had more than its fair share of unfairly reviled, underrated films. Usually these kinds of movies simply slip under the radar and everybody pays attention to (and loves) the big dumb movies that cost all the moneys. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing that these underrated films even got noticed, but I wish I didn’t feel so alone in my quest to champion them on the internet.

Oh well. Let’s get on with it!

The usual disclaimer:

I acknowledge that this is a subjective list. Trying to objectively compare the quality of any of these movies, one to the next, is impossible. It’s apples and oranges. You can like one move more than another easily enough, but it’s far more difficult to make a case for why one is better whether you like it more or not. For me, writing film criticism has most often been about trying to get at those qualitative things that exist in spite of your preferences, it’s about trying to objective in an arena that is usually assumed to be subjective. It’s about not conflating what I like with what is good, to the fullest extent possible. My Top 15 lists are not about these things. They are about ranking my favorite movies, about summarizing the year, and about taking stock.

15. Frozen

Review

Frozen is the best thing Disney’s in-house animation crew have done since Lilo & Stitch. It’s a heartfelt fairy tale with very intimate scope and an incredibly powerful outsider story. I hope it has set the bar to a new high for Disney, Pixar, and the other major animation houses. Elsa is a definitive character, transcending this film and becoming a potential symbol for a new generation of female character that have fully broken through to the other side of the sticky self-awareness of gender in contemporary media. Frozen is a film everybody can get behind, that you can show your kids without reservation and enjoy right along with them.

14. Don Jon

Review

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut is a consummately mature and charming movie about gender, relationships, and the way we all protect ourselves and our desires with masks that eventually difficult to take off. It’s incredibly funny and insightful, taking a light touch with its potentially heavy and provocative subject (and position) which keeps it from being preachy or didactic which would undermine just how damn entertaining and smart it is. In a year full of great comedies, Don Jon is probably the most relevant to our daily lives.

13. The Kings of Summer

Review

If there is a definitive theme for 2013 films, it may just be coming of age stories. There have been a lot of them this year, and none so pure and involving as The Kings of Summer. Though its premise is a bit outlandish, it transcends the trap of insincerity and quirkjerking that usually entraps these sorts of movies. It is the anti-The Way Way Back and manages to be about all the same things and a lot more with all the charm, humanity, and genuine emotional engagement that sorry film tries to cheat its way to. The Kings of Summer never cheats. It never rings false and it never contrives or produces without earning. Though it lacks the darker underbelly that coming of age stories (especially about boys) typically have, there’s nothing wrong with the optimist version of the story.

12. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

No review

One of my big regrets writing criticism in 2013 is that I didn’t manage to get out a review for Catching Fire. Better than the first one in every way, yet feeling like a natural extension (and escalation) of it, Catching Fire is one of the best sequels I can think of. When discussing sequels, people often use The Empire Strikes Back as a way to describe the “perfect” sequel. Sequels, especially middle chapters in trilogies, usually have the most issues being self-contained and satisfying by their own merits. Catching Fire is a true The Empire Strikes Back case, though. In fact, 2013 was also a year of great sequels (especially for Marvel) and I think that the franchising fever that Hollywood has been stricken with for the last decade or so has produced at least that much in terms of positive outcomes. Catching Fire is an influential movie, with Katniss Everdeen (and therefore Jennifer Lawrence) becoming new symbols of dystopian fiction and iconic female characters in any fiction. I’m totally conscious of not wanting to turn this argument into a mini-review of the film (regrets!) so I’ll leave it at that.

11. The Counselor

Review

The Counselor is the first on this list of the goddamn masterpieces that many people hated this year. This is one of Ridley Scott’s “small movies” and to me, it feels like a reaction to Prometheus. Having made a movie that most thinking people hate, Scott decided to make a movie that does not care what you think of it whatsoever. It almost actively dislikes the audience back. It’s like if Javier Bardem’s character was the avatar of the movie, at some party where his confidence and off-putting clothing made everyone wonder why he doesn’t care more what people will think about how he looks and acts. But he just does what he does because fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. To a great extent, that’s the exact attitude that informs The Counselor and its testy relationship with audiences. This is a movie that indicts us all, on some level, for sitting by and letting the War on Drugs continue to claim lives, both innocent and otherwise, and waste tragic amounts of time, money, and resources.

10. Prisoners

Review

Prisoners is a movie I think about a lot. It’s got as much density, layering, and narrative in it as some seasons worth of TV shows have. This a relentless and challenging film that features several fully realized thematic components which would, individually, be enough to fill out whole moves in their own right. A morality play, a sinister thriller, a police procedural, and the best Christian Pyscho movie since Se7en…  it’s all these things and an allegory about different types of justice. Prisoners is a movie that landed and stuck, but I think it’ll sneak up on some people. Just how good it is, especially the more you think about it. You’ll also never look at Hugh Jackman, who’s had a pretty good year, the same way again.

9. The East

Review

Getting to review and list a Brit Marling movie every year makes me feel so fucking spoiled. Continuing to be the best thing ever in The East (again collaborating with Zal Batmanglij of Sound of My Voice), she has helped craft another great character and this time one who is at the center of a deeply complex and topical story. Concerned with the extents to which activism can/can’t and should/shouldn’t go, The East is at its best when it refuses to settle on the easy binaries and absolutist moral divisions and rests its case on the invention of a third path. It’s so much easier to pick a side in a two-sided argument and stay with that, but The East acknowledges both sides with more fairness than it has to. It encompasses the merits and the flaws and transcends them, creating a synthesis of moral action that nicely aligns with the Hegelian progression of ideas. The East is being unfairly maligned as a pop ecoterrorist movie with only vague pretenses and nothing to say. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it’s surprising how carefully yet willingly this film makes a case and stands by it. Beyond that, it also functions beautifully as a spy movie and character study, showcasing some of the best young actors in films today.

8. Spring Breakers

Review

So imagine a different party. This one is full of regular people again, people who care what others think and indulge a basic level of conformity based on that. Like you, like me. Regular people, no implied judgement. Along comes James Franco’s Alien, not unlike Javier Bardem, and he just doesn’t care. Not only that, but he’s actively dangerous. That is Spring Breakers in a (probably) half-baked nutshell. Spring Breakers is the kind of film that is a masterpiece most people are going to hate and simply not understand. That’s okay. It’s not a case where you can really blame anyone for not getting it. In fact, I sort of think Harmony Korine banked on his movie being so off-putting, so nasty about the worst aspects of our generation, that no one would really want to deal with it. Getting back to that party, Alien is standing there with an invisible bubble around him, an aura that none of the normal people are going to penetrate. He’s just too much. And he doesn’t care if you think so. It would be easier to ignore Spring Breakers if its neon-lit poetics weren’t so alluring and enticing. But they are. That’s the danger. That’s the genius. Spring Breakers is a great companion to The Counselor not only for being honest about the appeal of the shadier side of life, but for refusing to absolve us all of our complicity in it or how it is used to manipulate, sell, and destroy.

7. The World’s End

Review

For my money, this is the best and most insightful of the masterwork “Cornetto Trilogy”. The World’s End does super complicated and nuanced shit with action, symbolism, comedy, characterization, and narrative compartmentalization and makes it look easy. Edgar Wright is so at the top of his game, so in command of his skillset, that watching him work it in these films is exactly like watching Cirque du Soleil or a fucking concert pianist. If it has any flaws, it may be simply too overstuffed for most people. Of course, the dummies get caught up in the stylized and heightened bits (the fights mostly), but that shit matters not. What matters is the memories, man. The memories!

6. The Fast and the Furious 6

Review

Somewhere between “We hongry” and Fast Five, I became a diehard fan and apologist of the Fast and Furious franchise. For me and those special fellows of mine, this is the action franchise. It’s weird how it happened, and that it happened at all. But I’m so glad it did. Fast 6 betters its predecessor in every way, upping the ante and including more fisticuffs and gunfights that echo and extend from the best examples from other movies. Combining its special, goofy charm with the car chases and fights of the Bourne films with Michael Mann-style gunplay, Fast was well on its way to converting even its stubborn detractors until the untimely death of Paul Walker. Those who know me know that this movie isn’t so high on this list because of his death, but because it is honestly the best classic-style action film of 2013. Hands down. With Walker gone, the future of the series is clouded but even if it doesn’t reach the heights it does in this entry, it won’t take away the fact that these movies turned an embarrassing Point Break rip off into the weirdest, most unlikely successful franchise in contemporary cinema.

5. The Croods

Review

The Croods is fucking amazing. At first glance, it’s another celebrity-stocked cynical cash-in movie in a “genre” (can animated films really be one genre, don’t they encompass many?) that was once full of little else. Nowadays, it doesn’t even surprise me when it isn’t a Pixar or Disney movie that raises the bar for animated films. Dreamworks now continuously resets that bar and shows no signs of slowing down or getting complacent (unlike Pixar perhaps). Not only is The Croods a beautiful example of what animation is capable of, it also features a great story with tons of heart and a cast of likable, flawed, and heroic characters. Ultimately, this film is a love letter to the transcendent nature of imagination. That makes it a powerful movie to watch with kids, who understand land whales and giant owlcats in a way that adults often can’t, which keeps movies like The Croods much less most of animation in general in a kind of self-contained ghetto. Animation is where some of the most exciting things are happening right now, in terms of entertainment. Not just in film, but in television as well. The Croods is the kind of movie that makes you proud of not being too much of a snob to watch “cartoons”.

4. Only God Forgives

Review

This one is probably the most underrated film on this list. It is also the most unfairly maligned, maybe. Spring Breakers is rightfully controversial, but the reaction to Only God Forgives kind of perplexes me. Mostly because some of it comes from people who should have been ready for Nicolas Winding-Refn to return to the weirder, moodier, and darker films he is better known for. Maybe the shock comes from Ryan Gosling, who is one of those actors who takes the kinds of risks that put him in movies that land on best and worst lists at the same time (another example? James Franco). Gosling is fully self-aware in this film, doing what can only be described as assassination to the somewhat ignorance-based (people need to watch some of his older films, seriously) perception of him in pop culture. Only God Forgives is a surreal tale of masculinity, Freudian sexual depravity, and finding a moral center in a nihilistic, hostile world. In most years, a movie like this would seem singular but in 2013 it’s another masterpiece in an embarrassment of riches.

3. Pacific Rim

Review

Speaking of riches, it’s fundamentally amazing that a movie like Pacific Rim even exists. It bothers me more than it probably should that this is a movie that I actually have to defend to people. Pacific Rim is a work of such immense scale and imagination that most criticisms of it seem misguided at best. I’ve seen it more times than any other film on this list, and my love for it has grown each time. Initially, I was taken in a bit by the lukewarm reception it received from people who expected it to be a little less the live-action anime that it turned out to be (and rightfully so, I think). With clever uses of genre gender conventions, action so crazy and big that it’s in a class of its own, and an arrangement of details and world-building that are basically a license for expanded universe and fan fiction, Pacific Rim has everything it takes to be a lasting cultural pastime, and it’s the closest thing to a Star Wars that our generation has produced. Too bad it won’t be appreciate in its time.

2. Gravity

Review

The only tough call I made on this list was putting this movie second after my number one pick. Gravity is one of those rare films that completely bridges the gap between the supposed high and low brows of filmgoer. Everybody gets this movie. The last time a science fiction film appealed so readily to every channel was probably Inception. Not only is Gravity the most beautiful and exciting to watch movie of 2013, it’s got to go down as one of the greatest (if not the) space-set films ever made. Though I understand the misgivings some might have over other films in this list, I’d never understand anyone who had anything bad to say about Gravity. It’s the closest thing to a perfect movie anyone could really ask for. Narratively, technically, and structurally, and in every other way it counts for a film, Gravity is an unequivocal masterpiece.

1. Upstream Color

Review

Shane Carruth is a genius. Upstream Color is only his second film and though it is entirely his own, with no studio involvement and no compromises, it never descends into self-indulgence and always maintains a careful, confident restraint that serves its elegiac, mysterious story. I called Upstream Color one of the weirdest love stories ever told. It is that, and far more than that. It’s a tone poem about the inexplicable nature of, well, nature. And connection. And love. And the finding of patterns, of symphonies in the unconnected, trivial, and even the ugly. It’s a movie that defies easy classification, yet is unapologetically a work of science (or speculative, if you like) fiction. Like many of my most favorite movies, the ones most deserving time and appreciation, it is a film that requires you to think and pay attention and then think some more. It’s a film that reacts to you as you watch it, rewarding you for not being a passive pair of eyes but a participant in the occasionally (but always uniquely) interactive dimension of film.

Honorable Mentions

• Pain & Gain
• Thor 2
• Iron Man 3
• This is the End
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Stoker
• Dead Man Down
• Oblivion
• Mud
• Before Midnight
• The Conjuring
• Scenic Route
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
• We Are What We Are
• Fruitvale Station
• The Spectacular Now
• The Place Beyond the Pines

Wish I’d Seen*

• The Brass Teapot
• Kiss of the Damned
• The English Teacher
• Violet & Daisy
• The Bling Ring
• Blue Jasmine
• Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
• Short Term 12
• Rush
• Diana
• Filth
• How I Live Now
• Blue is the Warmest Colour
• Captain Phillips
• 12 Years a Slave
• All is Lost
• The Fifth Estate
• Dallas Buyers Club
• Philomena
• Charlie Countryman
• Nebraska
• Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• Her
• The Secret of Walter Mitty
• The Wolf of Wall Street

*A few of these won’t technically be released in my area til 2014. I will possibly end up counting films like Her or Inside Llewyn Davis as 2014 films for the purposes of next year’s list.

*

RIP you beautiful man.

So goes another year. Another list. See you in 2014.

DiCaprio was born to do this.

The Wolf of Wall Street is another in the series of controversial, but wholly awesome, movies released in 2013. Like Spring Breakers (and actually a great companion piece to it), it is being chalked up by the odiously politically correct as some sort of glorification of the debauchery, violence, and criminal acts that it portrays. The reality is a lot more complicated than that. The complexity of the tendencies for humans to succumb to greed and amorality is very much a theme of the film. To not notice this is to simply refute the very presence of complexity in favor of presumably comforting fictions about moral absolutes or the ever-present notion that depiction equals endorsement.

I’m into the complexity of this. I’m into how it shows the audience the destructive consequences of these lifestyles, including legal ramifications, while also inviting the audience to think about how society is complicit in the behavior of wretched men and women. Spring Breakers and The Counselor both contain the same accusation that Wolf makes. People get away with this shit because we let them. Because we celebrate greed and debauchery and exploitation. Though those other two films are focused on their own specific areas, Wolf shoots straight for the single greatest social and political issue of our time: the consequences of unregulated capitalism.

Martin Scorsese is in his 70′s and is still the master. It helps that his complex, thematically nuance film is wrapped in an entertaining, funny, scathing, and energetic cinematic package. This is a three hour long movie that moves like it’s half as long. It’s a remix of Goodfellas in the best possible ways. It’s got great performances from reliable master actors, and surprisingly deft performances from newcomers or the less seasoned. Ignore the misguided haters, they’ve got preconceived notions and confirmation biases, and see this for yourself. Listen carefully to the thesis delivered by Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) and how it underlines that even legal stock trading is an exploitative enterprise. Watch those faces at the very end of the film, those hungry pathetic faces, who know what Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) has done but do not care. They want to be rich.

You, me, everyone we know. We’d all like to be rich on some level. We all have lengths we’d be willing to go to get there. We can all feel, in spite of ourselves, the degenerative fun of some of the things Belfort and his friends do. Scorsese is asking us how far is too far. He’s inviting us to see where our lines are and use that realization to feed back into an awareness of the things we did laugh at or find amusing. 

McConaughey kills it in his key scene.

The film introduces us to Jordan Belfort, a real guy, when he’s at the height of his riches. Then it peels that back and shows us how he started out. He wants to be a broker, but he’s still under the impression that the business is about making trades that enrich everyone, not just the company he works for. Hanna disabuses him of that notion straight away, giving him a taste of the “Masters of the Universe” arrogance which seems necessary to maintain the lifestyle these people build for themselves. Substance abuse, greed, and stepping over other people in a race to the top… that’s the code.

From his upbringing in Queens, Belfort has a group of friends he hires for his own company. This comes after he learns that there’s a trade in “penny stocks” where the commissions are huge. To begin with, he uses his bright white collar high-pressure sales techniques to convince regular people to blow their savings on shitty companies. He takes home 50%. Then he builds his own million dollar company on this basis, along with some insider trading with his close friends, and the law eventually comes calling.

Belfort’s crime is to sell people on a lie. But it’s not really a lie, not for men like him who are inner circle enough to make it a reality. It’s a lie for the blue collar types he exploits. They think they’re going to bet $4000 and come away with twice that. They think they’re going to blitz through their mortgages, car payments, etc because Belfort and his cronies have convinced them to trust and believe or they’re cowards, losers, and dupes.

The boat scene with Belfort and Denham (Kyle Chandler) is amazing.

But how Belfort made this all work isn’t the fascinating thing. It’s that it works at all. It’s that his company, many of whom literally have their lives in his hands because of how he does business, worship him. It’s the power and sway that come with all that money, and the kind of boredom that it entreats. Watching him go from fucking hookers to having lit candles up his ass. That’s the fascinating thing. The entertainment and sheer slapstick inventiveness of the ur-Quaalude scene is counter-balanced by his breakdown when his wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie, expect to see a lot more of her) finally gets tired of his shit. We can laugh as Belfort struggles to get home while profoundly high and then be angry and unforgiving when he punches his wife in the stomach.

But even she is complicit. She knows about the money smuggling, the illegality of what her husband does, but she stands by and lives the life of the “duchess” that he has crafted for her and trapped her in. Until it’s all become untenable, of course. Everyone around Belfort is like this, and the film reminds us of the dangerous temptation of money far more than it celebrates the crazy shit you can get up to when you have it.

Complexity.

Margot Robbie has one of the breakout performances of the year.

That said, I think Scorsese is fascinated by the fact that people, by and large, seem to want to live like this. Otherwise, why do we put up with it? Why do we not punish people like Belfort more harshly? The scene where he actually goes to prison and… plays tennis should tell you everything you need to know about the relative morality of Wolf. This is a film that only passes judgment subtly. It tells its story and lets us decide for ourselves. If, seeing all of this, we remain the zombie-like faces in Belfort’s sales seminar at the end, then what the fuck. Maybe Scorsese and writer Terrence Winter intended to piss people off and get angry letters because their film isn’t moralistic enough. It seems likely.

But it’s really unfair to consider this film to be a glorification or celebration of these people.

Jonah Hill proves that Moneyball was not a fluke.

I think that this film would ruffle less feathers if it wasn’t so damn timely. This all hits close to home considering the recent history. Wealth gaps and the seemingly unassailable nature of Wall Street is very much on peoples’ minds. Therefore, there’s a sense to which the uproar about this movies “message” is ironic. If anything, The Wolf of Wall Street may feel cathartic for those looking for a case where a white collar thief actually had to face up to his crimes. It’s an indictment of the culture that makes that facing up relatively easy to bear (tennis!) and then not much of a thing at all as Belfort remains a successful motivational speaker. It’s that the other stuff in his life, his marriages and friendships, go so wrong that we find the cautionary nature of his degenerative, exploitative life. Belfort did care about that stuff, at least in the film, but he loved the money and power more. The drugs too.

There is also the extent to which Wolf should serve as a huge “what the fuck” moment for people who relate this story to the ones in our headlines now, realizing that less than 20 years later and we no longer really put these people in jail. Instead, they get bailouts. Yes, there’s a difference between Belfort and other Wall Street firms but recall Mark Hanna and his exposure of the fundamental ethic of the stock trade. The difference isn’t that big because the principles are the same.

It’s sort of weird that DiCaprio happened to play two megarich and charming assholes this year.

Even if I put aside the argument that what’s going on in Wolf is far more complicated than a celebration of Wall Street and stock broker culture, there’s a lot to love about this film. I do think its substance is in how it relates to topics we’re pretty much all aware of and emotional about (usually angry) at this point. But it can’t be denied that this is a film full of the technical and artistic functions which, more than the thematic substance, coalesce into a masterpiece.

The performances alone are simply fucking nuts. Margot Robbie, Jonah Hill, Jon Bernthal, Kyle Chandler, and especially DiCaprio are all delivering amazing work. For DiCaprio, it’s career best. He’s showing more range, energy, and fun in this performance than he ever has before. He’s done a lot of more serious characters recently, but The Wolf of Wall Street gets past just the charm he effortlessly exudes (see The Great Gatsby for a performance more reliant on that) as well as the childlike innocence and lands on comedian. DiCaprio’s performance is easily one of the funniest of the year. That’s the power of this movie. You may not like Belfort very much, and you shouldn’t, but he is relentlessly entertaining and DiCaprio does stuff (the dance, the Quaalude scene, etc) that simply has to be seen to be believed.

I saw The Wolf of Wall Street a day or two too late to include it in my Top 15 list but my final word on the film is that it definitely, definitely would have been on that list. Although I’ve taken the stance that it is a complex treatment on its subject, I’m very open to the arguments either way. I think you could make an argument that it’s a dangerous sort of film, mostly because it can be so easily misunderstood (like Fight Club or Scarface were in their time). But I think that’s part of the point. Scorsese isn’t interested in saying “this guy is a piece of shit, don’t like him”. He understands that Belfort may be a piece of shit, but there’s appeal in the abandon with which he lives. There’s a sort of existential freedom once you’re passed the event horizon of society’s standards. That’s a dangerous thing, with dangerous appeal, and it is useful to have a peek into the lives of people who presumably get there, feel that, and carry on or not.

Zoe Bell carries the film perfectly.

Raze is as muscular as its dead-eyed female leads. It has little story, almost no exposition, and a production aesthetic that could appropriately be called spartan (and no, that’s not a reference to the Ancient Greek imagery in the film). It’s also one of the rare modern grindhouse films meant explicitly to reach an audience and teach them a thing or two about what exploitation cinema is all about.

This is great, actually. Even as films like Catching Fire, Frozen and Gravity draw attention to the viability of films heavily featuring and (more importantly) built around women, something like Raze comes around like a beat up, punk rock older cousin to bring it all into focus. Raze has two male characters in a cast full of young women, many of whom have done small roles elsewhere (a few together in Deathproof…. watch for a brief cameo from Rosario Dawson even) but are more less little-known. All of them punctuate this film’s many vicious action sequences with small pieces of raw character. Overlooked by many critics, its the marriage of character and brutal fucking violence (I mean seriously, some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen) that make this movie work so well.

Right up to the last few seconds, anyway.

Each woman gets her own distinct characterization. In a film this lean, it’s very welcome.

Raze is the women. Victims of a socialite organization with possibly ancient roots, they are brought together 50 at a time in a heavily monitored and controlled arena where they are matched and forced to fight to the death. A more 80′s premise you couldn’t find, but the 80′s version would be about men. The leverage used to control them is a very real threat to their loved ones: mothers, husbands, and children. Lose or refuse, your loved ones will die.

Though the fights are incredibly brutal to watch, they are made this way for a reason. Not only more realistic than your average fights on film, the fight scenes are what make Raze a horror film. Most of these women feel devastated and horrified by what they are forced to do. None more so than Sabrina (Zoe Bell) who was a soldier, once upon a time, and is being controlled via her estranged daughter whom she gave up for adoption. Even though she doesn’t know her, and can only watch her through the Organization’s camera systems (a constant and ghastly reminder), she refuses to sacrifice her.

In terms of physicality, it’s a tour-de-force performance.

What really works in this movie is the brutality of those fights coupled with the characterizations. It doesn’t really matter what the Organization is all about. Their backstory is just pulpy excuses to bank on the hook. This might make Raze sound like a shallow film, but it’s hard to maintain that criticism when so much of the emotionality of the regret, fear, hate, and anger that these characters feel (and display) is so palpable.

The only odd duck is Phoebe (Rebecca Chambers), a menacing and sociopathic fighter who likes what she is being asked to do. Recognizing her only equal in terms of skill, she pushes at Sabrina and goads her, bring around Sabrina’s reluctance to a place where she wants to release the anger and despair she feels at what’s being done to her and her fellows. Not to mention, she makes friends with two of the other women and Phoebe delights in murdering one of them.

Chambers delivers the most surprising performance in the film.

The snake-like leader of the Organization is a man  (Doug Jones) who jokes about being thousands of years old and tells the girls that he wants to make them into Monaeds, disciples of Dionysus who were known for orgiastic violence and cannibalism. But there’s also the host of spectators who sip champagne and watch the fights. Is this just an underground fight club with delusions of grandeur, or is there something more metaphysical at work?

This is where the film stumbles. There are a lot of Greek names and Greek imagery and this whole Monaed thing, but none of it really sticks as the film refuses to tell that story. Fortunately, it does tell a story and it’s a great story until it ends. The ending is so frustratingly unsatisfying on its own that it almost sinks the film. Worse, it suggests something about the thematic undercurrent of the film that is a bit… unsavory.

This movie is a lot of girls in white tank tops kicking the shit out of each other.

See, Raze can easily be read as a particularly strong metaphor for the exploitation of women in society. I actually think it might get at something really well observed about the way women are pitted against each other socially, as competitors and enemies. That said, it just as strongly suggest the possibility of friendship, compassion, and sacrifice to overcome those obstacles. When all else fails, it puts the means of revenge in the hands of the butt-kickingest one of them all and lets her totally unleash on the structure of oppression, including the oppressors. It’s telling that this is only possibly because of a desperate allegiance with a last-minute replacement fighter who, like the first woman we meet in the film, has no idea what it’s all about until Sabrina attacks her. This time, however, Sabrina doesn’t use the reveal as a way to win. She’s stopped playing that game. This sort of stuff means something.

But then, Sabrina escapes the place after murdering all the villains (except for the anonymous socialite crowd) and is shot by a sniper as she runs to her freedom. This is a cheap, cheap ending. The reason it’s unsatisfying is because it was probably meant as a last minute shock-shot of the kind that are so lazily employed in horror films. It’s not only unsatisfying in that sense, but it also undermines the themes I discussed in the paragraph above. It’s as if Raze decides to say, at the last minute, that there’s no real escape from exploitation and forced-conflict than death. Like there’s no way out for women but to get butchered by men.

And that fucking stings. It pretty much ruins the movie, thematically. If I were in the habit of giving this type of advice, I’d tell people to stop the film just before we see the sniper-guy raise his gun. Let Sabrina’s fate be ambiguous. She earned that much. Killing her cheapens the story, cheapens the message (even if it was an unintentional message), and cheapens the struggle we’ve gone through with her.  It’s one of the worst endings I’ve seen in a long time, topping even Mama‘s uninspired bullshit.

I still want people to see this, though. Just understand how the ending will leave you feeling.

I like to think they are beholding me, tapping away at my keyboard and writing about them but the truth is far more horrifying.

I haven’t written a movie review in almost 2 months. Picking The Lego Movie to be the comeback review is a bit daunting since it’s liable to be one of the best films of 2014. It’s also one of the best all-ages films I’ve seen, even among all the other great ones that have been coming out lately. Is there a more consistently good subgenre right now? I doubt it.

The Lego Movie comes to us from Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (with almost a third director credit deserved by Chris McKay who will be doing the sequel). These guys not only gave the world Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, they also took what should have been a terrible idea with inevitably terrible execution, and made it work, when the took the jump to live-action with 21 Jump Street. One of that film’s major strengths was its self-awareness. Lego is no different. This is as self-aware as movies get. With respect to their other films, Lego maintains the Miller-Lord package of bedrock sweetness with coatings of absurdity, social commentary, industry wit, and strong characterizations.

I shit you not. Every time you sit back in your seat and think about how fucking crazy it is that Lego is lighting up your life, it pulls out some new stop that piles on a new layer of nuance, excitement, and meaning. Many have wanted to dismiss this as little more than another glitzy Hollywood toy commercial. It goes way beyond that, though, finding time to even comment on The Lego Group as a company, the philosophical underpinnings of what Lego can and does represent as a “toy” (both good and bad), and so on.

This is a movie where it’s perfectly okay to ignore one level of commentary whilst walking away enriched by another. You know how I spend tons of time ranting about a thing called the “Hero’s Journey” on this blog? Well Lego might just present the best skewering of the model that I’ve ever seen. But it does have something for everyone. Honest.

It has that much going on. And full disclosure, I’m a huge fucking Lego fan. This could be why it’s taken me a while to write this, as the urge to just gush like a motherfucker was more difficult to control when I first walked out of this. After seeing it a second time last weekend, I think we’re safe and ready for some actual analysis. If you’ve been skeptical of this up to now, I invite you to read the entire review even with spoilers as I’ll make a pretty good case for why you should get over your skepticism and make this the next thing you watch.

It’s been out for like a month but meh, here’s a SPOILER WARNING.

Chris Pratt is really just perfect casting.

Lego is about a generic construction worker named Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) who winds up in the middle of a struggle between a “creative class” of Lego Master Builders and the machinations of Lord/President Business (Will Farrel) who has successfully and arbitrarily divided all the Lego themes up into separated, walled off domains where he can control them. His master plan is to use the Kragl (krazy glue!) as a weapon to forever freeze all the denizens of the various Lego Lands in place.

Along the way, Emmet finds the “Piece of Resistance” (the movie is full of wordplay and puns that work way better than you might expect) which singles him out as “The Special”. All this terminology is handed down from a wise, blind Master Builder named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman, enjoyably sending up his own public image here) from a prophecy about the way Lord Business will eventually be stopped.

The Good Cop/Bad Cop stuff is genuinely dark and disturbing.

Now, in just that simple synopsis we have the building blocks of where this film is going thematically. Lego is a huge fucking business and yet, the antagonist of this movie is basically Capitalism McSocialControl and this is surprising on its face. The deeper you go, the deeper you see the essential criticism that Lego is indulging about the way commerce and organization control facets of our lives to the point of oppression, even benign oppression as it’s mostly experienced by the citizens of Bricksberg (the “City” themed domain Emmet is from). The film continuously explores this essential relationship, taking time to show the upsides of both social order and chaotic creativity. It slyly presents extremism as ultimately unworkable while lauding the way each of us has the potential to be both creative and cooperative, selfish and selfless.

This can be read in ways both sophisticated and simplistic. For most of the kids in the audience, this is going to be about the way we need to get along and work together in order to do wonders. That’s as close to a core theme as Lego gets but it’s never satisfied with just that much. For the grown-ups, the invitation is to dig a bit deeper into how Bricksberg with it’s consumerism, superficiality, and apathy mirror aspects of our own world. The social criticism of this theme isn’t simplistic or superficial in itself, as shown by the occasional places where Emmet (and thus the audience) is allowed to be momentarily aware of those parallels and how fucked up they are. Case in point, Lord Business runs Octan (Lego’s in-universe energy megacorp) just like the oligarchs of the USA run their empires, with various subdivisions and acquired companies providing services that run the gamut from basic needs (food and shelter) to abstractions of our political process (voting machines). That shit has legs.

Overpriced coffee is a cornerstone of society in Bricksberg. It’d be adorable if it weren’t so astute.

Like any good comedy, the meat of Lego is its expertly observed messaging and the light-at-first-glance humor with which it handles it. It’s surprising but not in itself profound that the movie is willing to take a shot at consumerism. What is profound is that it doesn’t just stop there, which it easily could have and I’d still have been impressed at the boldness with which Lord and Miller handled such a weird gig. The send up of consumer culture is just the first act of the movie, when we meet the “creative class” of recognizable pop culture and legacy Lego characters (from all their licenses and their in-house stuff), they are a bunch of individualistic and iconoclastic social rejects. Their fight with Business is only to the extent that Business destroys all the cool shit they can’t help but make. Unfortunately, they are incapable of working together or following a coherent group-think plan. Rather than making a case that such individual high-creatives can’t work together, it argues that creativity achieves better when it does conform to a guiding vision. And how is this not what it’s like to actually make a film?

So the criticism cuts both ways. It’s true that the movie doubles down on the side of freedom from control, and on pointing out the absurdity of trying to control everything in the first place, but it doesn’t spare the heroic creatives either. In fact, we get to know more of them and get a far closer look at where they go wrong than we do with Lord Business. Only Emmet, generic though he is, can really get them working together because that’s the only way he knows of to accomplish anything wonderful. But he learns to be creative within that structure, much the way Neo learns to use the Matrix against itself (there’s plenty of The Matrix in this film in general).

Somehow this movie even finds time to make fun of Batman.

Beyond the humor and nuance, Lego also features the same creativity it is celebrating. Shot like a “Brickfilm”, it simulates stop-motion and utilizes real Lego concepts and pieces in stunningly beautiful and creative ways. Even if the story, jokes, and themes weren’t so fucking solid, there’s a level of artistry on display that just frankly owns. And I don’t just say that as a Lego fan This ownership of the medium with which its working is not unlike that of the Claymation pioneers who managed to filter so much through an unexpected form. Lego shines with sight gags, physical comedy, and truly riveting action sequences that are all filtered through Lego. Rarely does it break away from Lego as the almighty unifier of this odd vision. When it does, it’s utterly in service to the deepest level of meaning it aspires to.

At some point, most people probably heard that this movie either breaks the Fourth Wall or just goes straight for some kind of weird “toys are alive” metaphysical shit. We see that Emmet’s story is a game being played by a kid named Finn, with his dad’s incredible collection of Lego. Not only does this answer the “what’s with all the on-Lego stuff?” question (Kragl and such), but it adds a whole layer of narrative. I’d argue that it doesn’t actually matter if Emmet et al have some kind of secret inner life, because that way lies the need to argue that creating narrative is like creating a whole new dimension of reality (contrived and limited though it might be compared to what we take as our reality) and that’s a conversation better had about, say, True Detective. At the very least, it isn’t necessary to understand what Lego is doing by introducing us to Finn and his dad. The new level of narrative is what really matters.

Finn is playing out a sophisticated inner struggle with his father. His dad’s the kind of Lego guy who hides his hobby in the basement where he meticulously crafts regimented dioramas of order, precision, and clean beauty. Finn’s sensibilities are those of a child: chaotic, free, and creative to the point of absurdity. As such, they clash when dad finds out that Finn is “messing with his stuff”. Only by backing down off his need to control does he see the merit in  Finn’s style of play. This brings the film full circle back to commenting on what Lego represents as a toy. There’s always been a tension between its dual natures as an instructions-guided model kit vs. a free building toy. The subculture around Lego is rife with the kinds of arguments and rants that typify any such community that has a vested interest in an established definition of its chosen centerpiece. Like Lord Business, Finn’s dad has to realize that creativity is its own reward, that control basically comes from fear and insecurity. The myth of the Special is concocted by Vitruvius with whatever intentions, perhaps to manufacture a singular hero, but it turns out to be about what we’re all individually and collectively capable of.

And that’s just wonderful.

Even a seemingly minor character like Unikitty (Alison Brie) has an inner life that circles back to the central themes.

One of the few criticisms being leveled at this film by anyone is the idea that its ending betrays an aversion to “girl’s play”. When Finn is told his sister is going to be welcomed to play Lego now too, the look of horror on his face (reflected by the denizens of the Legoverse when the Duplo-beings invade) isn’t about gender, but about another level of the same reaction his dad had to the idea of being “invaded” by another style of play. Finn will have to learn to be more open-minded, essentially, which is a funny joke for an audience that realizes how inconsistent kids are, and how consistent the age gap is. Plus, it just rings totally true for anyone who ever had a sibling fuck with that spaceship they spent 6 days building.

While anyone seeing this movie will likely realize the abject nonsense of such a claim, it may be worthwhile to talk about what I view as a minor (the only) weak link in this film, a thing that is partially inspired by some of the misguided “feminist” criticism of the ending. WildStyle/Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) has basically the same arc as the female lead/love interest in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. She has an identity crisis somewhat predicated on being girlified and rejecting that (this is a subtle layer of the characterization). Her darker identity as WildStyle is out of want to be Special without really realizing she already is. To the extent that his affable friendliness helps her discover herself, Emmet is a better match for her than Batman (Will Arnett) is. But the relationship is never all that strongly pursued into true romance territory. Which is probably for the better since it’d be weird to stage a Lego kissing scene (the movie nicely sidesteps this).

Poor Green Lantern.

Now. The Lego Movie was always going to have a romance. That’s just par for course in all blockbusters since Star Wars. That means it’s a trope and tropes are not necessarily bad. Execution is what matters. So. Is WildStyle poorly executed? Yes and no. It’s possibly telling that The Lego Movie does not pass the Bechdel Test. But I don’t always think that test is a legitimate issue for movies, so I only mention it for those that adhere to it as a rule. That said, WildStyle is a well-utilized female protagonist whose essential storyline does boil down to who she wants to be, even though that choice is formalized as a choice between boyfriends.

This is not Frozen or Brave, unfortunately, though those films have the benefit of being focused intently on the characterization of its female characters whereas Lego spreads itself far more evenly among an ensemble of both characters and themes. Does this help us mitigate the essential lack of representation of women in big budget productions? Not really. But it’s not as though Miller and Lord are neglectful. They, I think, understand both that they’re telling a story “more for boys” and that they’re telling a story with major cross-gender appeal. WildStyle isn’t a weak link because the character is poorly treated or written, but because the movie could have made time for her to make a more essential choice and not take the easy route of symbolizing that choice through the men she’s interested in.

It’s important to note that it’s a bit cheap to take shots at Lego for not “doing more” for what is a too-often underplayed and ignored problem in our cinematic landscape. Most movies would have only used one female protagonist, but Lego also has Unkitty. Most movies might have had WildStyle feature as more of a damsel or leaned on some of the more paternal aspects of Lego’s history for the character. This movie has two relatively strong female protagonists featured in a movie that is absolutely busy with set-pieces, big moments, and characters. That neither WildStyle nor Unikitty are every forgotten or left behind is saying something, and in all fairness I think more media deserves credit for taking steps even if not running the whole mile.

Fair enough?

The movie really lets its hair down during the motorcycle chair. I about fucking wept out of sheer joy.

A final bit about the Hero’s Journey…

Lego is the rare movie that takes The Hero’s Journey a step or two beyond its usual use as a storytelling blueprint (rather than the analytical model it was intended as). It does this by rejecting the Hero’s Journey as a model almost altogether. In the end, Emmet does receive a measure of grace from his journey and this does allow him to more or less save the day. That said, the Hero’s Journey is outed as bullshit by Vitruvius, in no uncertain terms, and it’s the liberation from the model that even allows Emmet to do what’s actually necessary. If the Special is made up, then it can be anyone and it can mean anything it needs to mean to bring people together.

This not only reveals the flaws and power of The Hero’s Journey as a narrative structure, it also says something about the nature of storytelling in itself. This has wide-ranging implications and, in its own way, The Lego Movie is as deeply invested in that very philosophical problem as are much more serious works of fiction (like True Detective say). One of the easy targets is religion. Lego shows us, so simply, exactly why religion is such a lie and yet so powerful and important to us as a species. Lego may accidentally (but efficiently) equalize between the myths and stories of religious impulse and those of escapist impulse, paralleling them and calling them the same. Which they sort of are. But like with religion, it matters less what story you tell yourself or others and more what you do with it. Emmet could have used Vitruvius’s story to rise above all his peers and become another Lord Business, but he uses it instead to bring people together and help them see themselves.

And that, too, is just wonderful.

Who doesn’t know an underdog story when they see one?

Snowpiercer is going to be a weird one for some audiences. Being that it’s directed by Joon-ho Bong, it is well in keeping with the Korean cinematic penchant for tonal shifts and plenty of space for tangents and characterization. In American hands, Snowpiercer would be a relatively straightforward allegorical science fiction film and likely half as interesting. I don’t mean to disparage American filmmakers or say they are uncreative. I just think that the studio system tends to stifle the anarchy of vision that Snowpiercer often indulges.

When it doesn’t work, Korean movies that do a lot of tonal shifts end up cacophonous, nonsensical, and silly. When it does work, it yields a particular (and peculiar) flavor of movie that shows just what we’re missing when these movies don’t get exposure on our side of the world. It’s also a lesson to people who are trying to make complex, character-rich sci-fi whether it’s movies, comic books like the one this is based on, or whatever.

Because of its broad and colorful cast of characters mixed with those deft, expertly maneuvered tonal shifts, Snowpiercer feels vital and unique even alongside the glut of “original” genre and science fiction films that have been so popular of late. Because of that uniqueness and its tendency to be surprising, especially in terms of tone, I’ve here written one of my most spoiler conscious reviews ever.

Yeesh.

In 80′s style exposition cards, the film tells us that global warming caused humanity to try a desparate solution: using a gas to cool the planet down. The solution backfired, causing a global ice age that quickly killed everything and everyone except for a few hundred people on a train known as the Rattling Ark (would have been a great title for the movie itself).

On the train, the poor and filthy have-nots live in the tail section while the affluent and hedonistic haves live in the front. All is directed by a reclusive genius, the inventor of the train and it’s perpetual motion engine, Charles Wilford (Ed Harris). He rules from the Engine, which is referred to with religious fervor by his mouthpiece, Mason (Tilda Swinton).

As the film begins, the Tail people are preparing for another in a long line of revolutions undertaken over the 17 years that the train has been the last vestige of humanity. We see how the armed guards are abusive, and how the Front people occasionally come to dole out barbaric punishments and also to steal children.

Swinton delivers.

This time, they are led by the determined, haunted Curtis (Chris Evans) who has a plan to rescue a security officer called Nam (Kang-ho Song) who designed the train’s redundant locking door system. Exchanging a drug called Chrono (made from industrial waste), Curtis and his companions secure Nam and his daughter’s help in their push to the front of the train.

What follows is a series of adventures, some comedic and most brutal, as they pass through the various cars (many of which are themed, for example one is a children’s school and another an aquarium/sushi bar). As they push forward, backstory and exposition and characterization are doled out in tantalizing nuggets that keep the momentum of both plot and theme moving forward.

The elusive, badass Grey.

Given the tonal shifts in the movie, the actors have a lot of ground to cover. Tilda Swinton is a complete natural at it. Her performance is probably the most bizarre and most enjoyable in the film. Evans is a stoic, reluctant leader and feels a bit like a cliche until later in the film when he gives a haunted monologue about his past, which serves several purposes and ties up a few loose ends even as it justifies his reluctant leader schtick completely. It’s a fucking heavy scene and Evans is competent, though I think he could have gone bigger to really sell it. This is a movie made for scenery-chewing, but Evans remains the reserved and understated center. That could very well have been intentional.

Serving in memorable sidekick roles are Edgar (Jamie Bell), Grey (Luke Pasqualino), Tanya (Octavia Spencer, who is great in this), Yona (Ah-sung Ko) and Gilliam (John Hurt). Edgar’s backstory, delivered by Curtis in his big monologue, is totally fucking heartbreaking. The more I think about it, the more that monologue completely reframes characterizations and events throughout the film.

An entire train car devoted to rude, privileged children.

There’s a lot of symmetry in Snowpiercer. Much of it is stylistic (a cheesy bit with bullets and windows), but some of it is grounded in character and entirely thematic (Curtis’s thing about his arms). This underscores the surface-level superficiality of the allegorical thrust of the film and helps the thematic wheel turn round again, just when you think that Snowpiercer is going to utterly commit to Hobbesian misanthropy.

And it is kind of a misanthropic film. The violence is brutal, but the train has had so many revolutions that it’s almost civil. As civil as fighting axes with rusty pipes could ever conceivably be, I guess. Then as you get deeper into this fucked up society and start connecting the parallels to our world, it gets even worse. Protein bars made of bugs stand in for the fast food and processed shit that the underclass of Western civilization subsists on. The religious fervor with which the train’s engine and Wilford himself are treated becomes a parallel of the pseudo-religious cults of personality (and bastardized Christianity) that are common in North America.

And even as you suspect that the whole thing is headed toward some kind of cannibalism reveal, you find that it’s a lot worse and a lot closer to home than you thought. Just when you think Joon-ho Bong is trying to convince you that people are the worst and they all deserve to die if the alternative is the ecosystem Wilford has created, he pulls back and gives a little glimmer hope (if not necessarily for humans).

These two are pretty entertaining and somehow apart from the carnage and misery around them.

But all this isn’t to say that Snowpiercer is a relentlessly grim movie. In fact, it has a lot of joking around and levity. So much so that you find yourself led along by the movie and surprised by how much you feel for this or that character death or relationship. For being two hours long and full of character stuff, Snowpiercer is remarkable for its tight plotting. This means that little in-character moments and a touch of humor go a long way toward setting up and paying off bigger moments and reveals.

If you want some kind of reference point for Snowpiercer, it would have to be Terry Gilliam. It’s no accident that John Hurt’s character is called Gilliam (and maybe his self-sacrifice is meant to be a meta reference to Gilliam also). Snowpiercer feels a lot like 12 Monkeys and especially Brazil. It’s got that industrial aesthetic, that layer of silly and grotesque, and that surprising social commentary that is trite on the surface but pays dividends the further in you let it lead you.

It also owes heavily to The Matrix trilogy. From the desire for freedom from confinement and control, to the realization that the struggle for freedom is just another manufactured system of control (that’s as spoilery as I’ll get, I guess)… you’ll notice a lot of similar ground covered here. In fact, I’d say the confrontation with Wilford owes a great deal to the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded. If that turns you off, sorry to hear it. Snowpiercer is a lot more accessible, in spite of what I said about the tone, and a lot more raw.

Chris Evans gets to do some fun action.

Snowpiercer is probably going to go down as one of the best and weirdest movies of 2014. In a year that promises to be full of science fiction of all shapes and sizes (from the similar-seeming Zero Theorem, a Terry Gilliam film no less, to the balls-out adventure of Guardians of the Galaxy or Jupiter Ascending), Snowpiercer might get lost in the shuffle of higher anticipated or wider marketed films. I hope not. This is one of the gems you feel lucky to discover before all your friends, the kind of movie that I loved best in my high school days when it was a lot harder to get in the know about the weird, obscure stuff. Nowadays something like Snowpiercer is pretty well known by movie nerds like me, and probably big on their radars. However, that doesn’t mean a lot of people will see it.

I hope they do.

A fairly elemental movie.

Noah is not a religious movie. It treats Christian/Jewish myth in the same way that we typically treat Norse or Greek. Unlike say, Clash of the Titans or Immortals, Noah is a serious engagement with the cosmic awe, divine command morality, and metaphysical majesty of those myths. I say myths because, as an atheist, I do not believe that the Abrahamic God exists or ever existed. I engage with a story like Noah‘s as a fantastical reflection of very human need and imagination. To its credit, Noah walks a fine line between dealing honestly with the magic (there is no better word) of the Noah fable and deriving from it a narrative which bears philosophical weight to contemporary audiences.

Though it would be fair to call Noah a Biblical Fantasy Epic, and it has a little action and adventure thrown in, the heart of the film is really in the study of character. Like all the other films in Darren Aronofsky’s career, Noah deals with the price of idealism and the temptation of obsession, but here recontextualized in an account of existential choice and powers so far beyond a simple man or woman that it takes a truly ambitious and unique clarity of vision to make it all work.

Noah is simultaneously the most conventionally constructed and possibly least accessible of all Aronofsky’s recent films. He hit the mainstream running with The Wrestler and Black Swan, but Noah more closely recalls the cerebral and mystical explorations of Pi and The Fountain. The latter is a film that he has apparently not quite shaken off. He utilizes some of the same visual flourishes and Clint Mansell’s (again with the Kronos Quartet) score occasionally recalls his seminal work on The Fountain as well.

Writing with Ari Handel, Aronofsky crafts a pre-apocalyptic world that feels at once alien and familiar to our own. It’s a world before time as we know it, earth as we know it, and life as we know it. It’s construction is tinged with awe, sadness, and haunting tendrils of connective tissue to our own. Noah is an ecological fable that equates the destruction of the planet’s life with the murder of a sibling.

Note the sky: a thinner atmosphere, stars in daylight.

Noah (Russel Crowe) lives in a world on the verge of annihilation. After the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, eight generations of humans have spread across the world (a single supercontinent). Forming a proto-industrial society, the descendents of the murderous Cain have acted as a plague, destroying the environment and eating the animals. What’s left is a barren wasteland of rusted out cities, “zohar” mines, and barren deserts.

Noah is the descendent of the line of Seth, the third brother. Seth’s descendants respect the Creator (God is never referred to as God) and his creation. They don’t eat animals, they take only what they need, and they are down to one last family. Prompted by prophetic dreams, Noah seeks out his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), an old mystical hermit and one-time warrior champion of the Watchers, a band of fallen angels cursed by God after descending to earth to help humans survive outside Paradise.

This movie has tons of beautiful, cosmic imagery.

With Methuselah’s guidance, Noah interpets the dreams to mean that the Creator will destroy the world in a flood. His job is to save the innocents, namely animals, in a giant ark. To do this work, the Creator surrounds Noah with miracles that win him the help of the Watchers. Embittered by their punishment and their treatment at human hands, the Watchers are one of my favorite parts of the film. They are alien beings, angels trapped in misshapen, rocky bodies. They can’t sit or stand comfortably, their features are muted, and they have an asymmetry that belies the seeming order of the rest of Creation. They are filmed with a combination of practical and CG effects, giving them a surreal feel that sometimes looks like stop-motion.

Samyaza (Nick Nolte) is the gentle Watcher that first sees the Creator’s plan in Noah. Together with his family and the other Watchers, they build the ark in a forest grown specially for them by God. Noah’s children age, animals flock to be saved, and the last remnants of the cursed descendants of Cain descend on the site of the ark for their own chance at salvation. Led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), the very man who killed Noah’s father years ago, they are a mad horde of depravity. As a whole, they’d be right at home in a film like The Road. But at the same time, they are sad and desperate and alone, outside of God’s grace.

These guys opposite each other is growling awesome.

And this is about where the film starts getting tricky. Along the way, Noah has decided that God’s true purpose is to eradicate all human life. To that effect, he refuses to believe that anyone outside his family are meant to be even temporarily saved on the ark. Only the descendants of Seth will be there to see the rebirth of Paradise. And so on. This bears directly down on the exceptionalism so common in religious culture. Aronofsky wisely approaches it with a bird’s (or God’s?) eye view. We’re meant to see and understand that perhaps Noah is wrong, until finally it is clear that he believes that himself.

But until then, there’s a war brewing between Tubal-Cain’s followers, who are given voice by the man himself. He speaks for the rhetoric of might is right, of a kind of destructive anthrocentrism that some have mistakenly likened to secular humanism. Tubal-Cain sees it this way: God doesn’t want us? Fuck God. This feels about as wrong to the modern, secular viewer as does Noah’s insistence on his sketchy interpretation of the Will. Especially when we spend some time with Ham (Logan Lerman, giving the film’s most subtle and MVP performance). Ham wrestles with his nature, unable to fully get over envy or wrath, he finds himself tempted by the power of Tubal-Cain’s worldview. His argument with Noah is a tale of Two Fathers, in some ways, but also really of only one.

Ham’s struggle is the human struggle of doubt, of internal morality.

Ham is perhaps the most interesting character in the film. He doesn’t necessarily agree with the Divine Command, and he sees the merit in Tubal-Cain’s self-determination (in spite of how destructive and narcissistic he expresses it). His sense of goodness comes from inside him, not from his father or from the God his father speaks to. He is the one who calls Na’el (Madison Davenport) innocent and good, after his father leaves her to die. This is, in the end, good enough for him. It’s sad that Ham goes his own way even as Noah realizes how wrongly he’s looked at his deeds.

But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

The first two thirds of the film are adventurous, cosmic, bold, and speculative. There’s world-building in there that is full of wonder and a kind of rare, gutsy cool that recalls David Lynch’s Dune or the way Star Wars used to feel. Eventually, after a giant battle when the Watchers defend the ark from Cain’s descendants as they madly rush it to try and save themselves, the film settles into an introspective period where Noah becomes the antagonist in his own tale.

The Genesis Montage is one of the greatest such sequences I’ve ever seen.

Noah’s revelation that all humans must die puts him at odds with his own father, with his own family. This is an echo of the Cain and Abel imagery that the film often returns to. It seems that narcissism and self-servingness are what pits brother against brother, or father against son. Though Methuselah’s answer to Noah’s certainty is to simply allow Ila (Emma Watson) to be fertile when an old wound had made her barren, it disrupts the clarity of Noah’s vision, the certainty that he is right and that the Creator does not want people to survive. As long as he believes this, Noah can accept the grave responsibility of letting hundreds of people die, of letting all possible futures of human lives die. Crowe acts out that weight with a paradoxical mix of subtlety and broadness that confirms him as the only person who could have or would have done this role.

Ila’s pregnancy means that Noah will have to kill the progeny if they are girls. This is because, presumably, Ham and his youngest son, Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll) would marry the daughters of Ila and Shem (Douglas Booth) to renew the human race. In the days of floating in the sea God has called down on the world, there’s a feverish tension between Noah and his family. Unbeknownst to him, Ham has helped rescue one survivor from Cain’s people: Tubal-Cain himself. Ol’ TC again reiterates the countering position to Noah’s submission, which again tempts Ham to plot against his own father.

It’s only later, when everything is over, that the weight breaks Noah. Alone in a cave, he drinks wine and regrets until Ila explains to him that his duty wasn’t to end the human race, but to decide its fate. This, on its surface, plays into the troubling trope of a single destined man deciding everyone’s fate, but on a symbolic level it’s all about how each of us makes a choice between powerful forces in our lives. Noah, in the end, chooses love and mercy over oblivion or destruction. That is a significant thing, and a symbol not only of the basic ability of humans to be moral without the word of God, but that it’s vitally important that we do this whether there’s a God or not. That’s a message I think a lot of religious people would do well to hear.

Remind anyone of The Fountain?

At the end of the day, this movie can hang it’s hat on the complexity of the combination it crafts between its humane rendering of a fantastical myth. If viewers are reluctant to accept that, it’s still got both a morally complex message that engages thorny issues of metaphysical morality on an adult, responsible level. Then again, it’s also got the giant rock angels, crazy world-building, and the kind of utilization of Christian myth that feels at least tentatively post-religious.

And that’s a valid way to view stories like this, even as an atheist. I mean, what do I take out of the idea that God plays a direct part in these character’s lives? It’s more interesting to speculate about the scenario, or to map out its connective tissue with the existential nature of our actual lives, as we experience and understand them. Noah meets you more than halfway on this stuff, and deserves much credit for being in the small but proud tradition of movies like The Last Temptation of Christ. Movies that go there, wiggle their toes a bit, and ask you to make up your own damn mind.

Moreover, Noah can be seen as an ecological fable, like I mentioned. It’s not just the corruption of human morality that causes God to wash them away. It’s actually never really attributed to that at all. It’s the way they use and abuse their environment, wantonly consuming and destroying and dominating. As per Tubal-Cain’s admonition: it’s all there to serve us. If our planet’s natural rhythms take the place of the Creator in this story, will they likewise punish us for how we’ve used what it’s provided us? I believe we’re meant to see it that way, and to understand Noah as a pre-apocalyptic fantasy allegory of exactly that. Even as we take in everything else it is.

Perhaps the most incredible and haunting bit of the film is a stop-motion sequence of equation: the violence of Cain and Abel played out in all eras, with all costumes, with all means of betrayal, envy, and murder.

I think Noah‘s complexity (there is really a lot going on in this movie, especially in the second half) will cohere more for me when I watch it again. My major takeaway at this point is that it has this complexity, but also that it’s just an amazingly large scale work of imagination. I mean, I think back to images and ideas in this film that will probably stay with me forever. Especially the stuff that is most mystical, most inexplicable. Aronofsky shows a natural flair for such things. I hope he eventually does a full-on science fiction or fantasy film so that his instincts can just run away with him.

I’m saddened at the notion that more militant atheists than I will ignore or dismiss this film because it does indulge the mysticism of Christianity (while still allowing for evolution, humanism, etc). I think it’s as important that atheists see this film as it is for Christians. It’s not going to convert anyone, or change anyone’s central beliefs. But it may hold up a mirror, or recontextualize certain ideas. If we’re close-minded, it can confirm our biases. If we’re open-minded, it can challenge them.

Wonder how this will turn out?

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a hot commodity in the unabashed success that is Marvel’s “Phase 2″. This post-Avengers run of sequels to the flagship solo superhero movies has been a prodigious leap forward in terms of care and quality and The Winter Soldier is no exception. In every way it is bigger, better, more self-assured, and more fun than its predecessor. But because it stays rooted in character, it relies fully on both Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers for its weight and impact. Beyond that, The Winter Soldier proves without a doubt that these movies can play with genre conventions without ever flinching away their essential nature as superhero movies. In this way, the Marvel films are following a tradition where superhero stories have always been at their best when they use their fantastic elements to comment on social issues, politics, ideology, and ethics.

All these movies lean in on each other, comment on each other, and strike out in bold new directions. It’s a unique enterprise, something we remind ourselves again and again is the first time anyth project like the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) has ever been attempted. Partly we do this because we’re in awe that this happened at all, that it continues to happen. Partly we do this because these movies keep getting better and keep not letting us move on to a place where the merit of the MCU stagnates or becomes obligatory.

That’s maybe the coolest thing about this movie. Past the scale and the action and even the depth, it’s that it feels like a breath of fresh air. When you think about it, that’s kind of crazy. Not that The Winter Soldier is perfect, mind you, but it perhaps comes the closest (at least technically) of any Marvel film thus far. If anything, it’s only flaw is more of a virtue: it leaves us very much wanting more.

Still one of the best things about the MCU: the fucking casting.

After helping the other Avengers save New York (and the world?), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) is one of SHIELD’s go-to field agents. The nature of the work, very different from what he was used to back in World War 2, ties directly into his ongoing effort to connect to the modern world. SHIELD is a compartmentalized, secretive organization and their less than savory schemes have already ruffled Captain America’s feathers once before (when he found their plans to use HYDRA weapons during The Avengers). Much of The Winter Soldier is an old school conspiracy thriller that just happens to star superheroes. As he unravels a mysterious series of plots running all the way to the top, he partners with Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) to fight his way to the truth.

Things kick off when he learns from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that SHIELD is planning to launch three new helicarriers that will have unprecedented hunter-killer efficiency. Their job will be to find threats and eliminate them preemptively. Not needing to refuel or rearm, they are the perfect weapon. Like the HYDRA weapons, this doesn’t sit well with Cap who sees war as an enterprise that should be undertaken reluctantly, defensively. He responds to this larger-than-life (though not as much as we’d like maybe) example of the United States taking extreme measures in the professed interest of security, a word that is quickly taking on more dimensions of meaning and implication than it can bear. The audience is meant to understand that Project Insight (what they call their helicarrier security protocol) is not dissimilar from the secret death lists, the drone warfare, and the rampaging war/intel apparatus that has overwhelmed United States foreign policy since 9/11. Cap identifies the psychology behind this shit immediately: it’s about fear.

There’s a lot of character development for the SHIELD characters this time out.

Because Fury is a bit more like Cap than he acts, he’s cut out of the plan and then targeted for assassination by The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), a mythic Cold War assassin who has surfaced every few years to deliver high-impact assassinations that have kept much of the world unstable. Fury appears to die at the Winter Soldier’s hand, leaving Cap and Black Widow to find out just what the fuck is going on.

Part of the reason they’re calling this The Avengers 1.5 as a nickname is because The Winter Soldier is very much an ensemble movie. More than with Iron Man 3 or Thor: The Dark World, this one keeps the nexus of the MCU front and center, pinning the substance of the shared universe on this character. Behind the scenes, the Iron Man franchise was the linchpin of the MCU which also meant that Tony Stark was the character most representative of it. Now we see evidence of Marvel’s confident shift of that weight onto the more than capable shoulders of Evans and his consistently perfect iteration of Captain America.  Anyway, if you like Fury and Widow and wanted to see more of them in action, this is certainly your movie. We even get a sequence where Fury gets to do more than just shoot at goons.

There are three glorious fights with The Winter Soldier, each one closing an Act of the film.

I mentioned that The Winter Soldier is kind of like a spy thriller. Well, it’s also a lot like an 80′s he-man action movie (most of which also had convoluted conspiracy plot lines and political ramifications). There are beats in this movie that will totally take you back to the Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks of your childhood. I kept getting a True Lies vibe from its expert balance of action, humor, and plot. Likewise, there’s a helluva lot of the New School of spy movie: The Bourne trilogy. In the action, which is heavier and more grounded than most of the other movies, you feel that Bourne influence a lot. And it works well, especially seeing Cap go hog wild on henchmen while having a real match between equals with guys like The Winter Soldier. The way he moves evokes his superhuman physicality, and coupled with the logical and cinematic use of the shield as a constant tool and weapon, this is the definitive version of Captain America’s superheroic feats on film.

But it also gets to the heart of why this character works. Especially in these times. Between the Russo Brothers (Community is what they’re most known for) and the squadron of writers that worked on this, it’s very surprising that a coherent and impactful film emerged. If you’re sitting down thinking about how to do a Captain America sequel in the modern world dealing with modern problems and modern morals, it might seem a bit daunting to go at the real stuff that’s currently haunting the world. But it’s also the brilliant move, the move that stems directly from the character. Of course Captain America would declare a private war with the military industrial complex run amok, and even though this is a serious and controversial family of subjects, this is a movie that is able to go there and have fun with it while also maintaining its integrity.

One of the main themes is that trust is a choice.

The way The Winter Soldier keeps from becoming a thinly veiled allegory or agenda movie is by undercutting its ventures into serious socio-political territory with comic book goofiness. Even as it gives the best summary of the swarm of shit surrounding the NSA, drones, and intelligence apparatus I’ve seen, it never forgets that it’s a comic book superhero movie. It turns out that half of SHIELD is actually HYDRA sleeper cells preparing to finally take over and establish their New World Order. Unbeknownst to our heroes, many of the people they’ve met are actually HYDRA and working with Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) and Armin Zola (Tobey Jones) to do so. Zola is trapped in a computer, sure, and responsible for the film’s roughest scene (an unapologetic but still kinda awkward infodump), but he’s still one of the masterminds behind SHIELD’s “true” purpose.

This is also where the integrity runs up to meet the goofiness, resettling the balance again. Cap’s integrity is the film’s integrity and he decides that it isn’t good enough to trade the bad for the good. When it’s suggested that they dismantle only the corrupted parts of SHIELD, he says no. The whole thing has to go. This is a bold choice not only as a message that expresses a position on the real-world issues the movie touches on, but also for the character and universe. SHIELD’s destruction also destroys much of the fulcrum of the MCU in a way that feels permanent and exciting. The montage of “what they do after” stuff toward the end of the movie also helps in making this feel like a plot development that’s going to stick. This is an advantage that a movie universe has over the comics it is adapting: it’s allowed to do things and do them with finality, giving those things real stakes and a sense of forward momentum to drive the drama and tension of the characters and their stories.

Great scene.

For Cap, trust is a big issue. He wants to trust his friends and colleagues and this underscores every interaction he has in the movie. He doesn’t trust Pierce or Fury unless they earn it. He immediately trusts Sam, and likewise, giving their superficially familiar (Tony and Rhodey) friendship its own dimension. Where things get interesting is with Natasha. He wants to trust her more than anyone, and their flirtations and conversations are tinged with that tension even as you notice that it works both ways. Cap has an unsettling effect on Natasha. He makes her more honest, and probably a better person on top of it. She’s someone who really wants tangible redemption, but relies on her potentially irredeemable skillset (and its uses) for that. Cap gives her a shot at something better, and when it comes it’s one of the best and boldest parts of the movie. When all is said and done, it’s Natasha who puts a face on the whistle blowing at SHIELD’s general direction. She takes on the Edward Snowden/Bradley Manning/Glenn Greenwald/Julian Assange mantle which is such a clever thing to do with this character that I’m totally excited by where they could possibly take her next. And that’s a huge part of this movie’s energy and merit. It makes you surprised and excited about the future across the board.

Though they get more attention and screen time than the titular Winter Soldier, he nevertheless brings the best drama in the film. Cap realizes that the Soldier is really Bucky Barnes, his oldest friend, as soon as he sees his face. Bucky has been experimented on and turned into a cyborg (the arm is so well used, by the way). Playing the role sort of like an Alzheimer’s patient, Stan does such good work with so little that I think the one common complaint about this movie is that he’s not in it more. The physicality and childlike confusion go together to keep this guy always compelling and sympathetic at exactly the right level and timing. Comic readers know that eventually, Rogers eventually dies and Bucky replaces him. Teasing this for the inevitable third sequel in multiple ways, I think everyone will be much more excited if it turns out to be in the cards now that they’ve seen Stan let his hair down (literally, dammit!).

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

Actually, Stan’s decision to play Bucky as kind of like an Alzheimer’s patient nicely dovetails with a very sad scene where Cap visits the elderly Peggy Carter (Haylee Atwell). At first, their reunion is a sweet reminiscing that is made heartbreaking by the earnest emotional depth Evans brings to the character. Then it gets even worse when she slips into that reminiscence the way only someone suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s can. Cap is in a world that remembers him, sure, but the people who care about him and who he cares about the most only remember him with pain. Part of the reason Cap is such a great character is that he doesn’t let this stuff turn him into an angsty, self-absorbed brood machine. He adapts and overcomes, literally, and forges new relationships while trying his hardest to preserve the old ones that he values so much. The writers of the film said that the world doesn’t change Captain America, he changes the world. It’s a great summary of the character and his lasting value.

Lest we forget that Captain America is a patriot and stands for a certain set of classic, traditional, and praiseworthy American values, he eventually suits up in the WW2 uniform, symbolizing a remembrance of those values. That he then triumphs over the fearful works of a fucked up world likewise symbolizes the obtaining merit of those values. It’s a fun way to use the “greatest generation” bullshit that must come with this character, and it’s a way that manages to be a little cheesy without being cringey.

Some have taken umbrage with the level of destruction in this movie.

There’s a certain breed of fellowgeek that loves the darker iterations of the classic characters. This is part of the legacy of Nolan’s Batman films, now being carried on at least spiritually by the Snyder-helmed Man of Steel. There was a lot of discomfort at that film’s third act destructiveness. In Man of Steel, Superman and Zod destroy cities and cause probably thousands of deaths. When Pacific Rim came out and was defended by some of the same people who derided Man of Steel, myself included, it was a total gotchya moment of smarm from that faction. Then it was pointed out that Pacific Rim, like many other movies featuring large scale loss of human life and property damage, goes out of its way to be responsible about it by including lines of dialogue or brief scenes that show people are at least trying to mitigate the damage, that the heroes are first and foremost trying to do that. Enter The Avengers which had to be defended the same way. Now enter The Winter Soldier where Captain America himself racks up quite the body count of henchmen and HYDRA goons. Not only does the movie go out of its way to balance the death and destruction with moral responsibility and heroism, it centralizes this issue by being exactly about the extent to which we’ll fuck ourselves by causing damage to prevent other damage, and how this relationship should always be defensive rather than aggressive.

Like Cap says to Falcon, the bad guys are the ones who are shooting at you. A throwaway and fun line of banter like that is actually very important to the ethos of this film. Cap is a guy who believes in the rules of engagement, in civility even in times of war. That is what this movie is saying America has lost, that Cap shows its audience can be inspiring and cool at the same time.

I’m looking forward to the redesign of Falcon’s militarized and easily-compromised gear.

One of the things we love about the Marvel movies is that they refer to comic lore and to the other movies. Taking this to a level of distraction, The Winter Soldier introduces characters and ideas without ever really paying them off. Like Sharon (Emily Van Camp) Carter who is only introduced by first name, yet has a sizable secondary role. Presumably, she’ll be in Cap 3 along with Frank Grillo’s STRIKE agent (who gets injured and becomes comic character Crossbones, allegedly). This stuff being thrown in without really going beyond suggestion makes the movie feel a bit stuffed, a bit like it’s under-sewing seeds that won’t sprout for like 4 more years. This isn’t much of a criticism, granted, because really it boils down to wanting more (both Van Camp and Grillo are fun in their respective roles, after all!).

Much as I liked The Dark World, it lacks the exciting momentum of The Winter Soldier. But both lack of the pathos and cleverness of Iron Man 3 so it seems that each of these films brings something different to the table. Each of them is firmly set on exploring these characters both as superheroes and as (essentially) human beings. Just as the Iron Man movies were always about Stark’s relationship with himself, and the Thor‘s have been about Thor’s relationship with his family, it appears that Captain America will always be about Steve Rogers and his place in the world. Not only does The Winter Soldier leave that journey in a place where we’re both satisfied and eager to continue (in spite of some “middle movie” seams), it leaves the entire MCU in the same state.

I mean, just think about the end credits teaser with The Twins. Fuck yeah.

A step up from The Avengers suit,  I still like WW2 Cap best.

Doesn’t gotta be Steve in the suit forever, does it?

So by now most people who care about the MCU will have seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Given that the film did come out recently, I think I’m going to go ahead and declare this piece to be a SPOILER ZONE so don’t read it unless you really feel the need. In case you didn’t gather from the article title, this going to be about what evidence I can gather, what reasoning I can muster, to support my current pet theory about the third Captain America film which should arrive sometime in 2016.

If you’ve seen the movie and want to add or disagree, please feel free to throw your thoughts into the comments. Would love to hear ‘em.

Premise: Steve Rogers will die in Captain America 3 and Bucky Barnes will become Captain America.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to just spout off on this without laboriously supporting the theory! I will break down my reasoning into categories. The first of which will be:

Argument from Behind the Scenes

Marvel Rehired the Russo Brothers for Cap 3. This is a show of faith in their vision for the character and his story. They seeded their movie with loose ends like Crossbones and Sharon Carter and have made cryptic hints to how this stuff will come back in Cap 3. Particularly Crossbones (Brock Brumlow as played by Frank Grillo), who they’ve said got a bit of an “origin story” in The Winter Soldier and is heavily rumored for a planned appearance on Marvel: Agents of Shield. It makes sense that whatever they’re going to do in the third movie is not only going to pay off these things, but will also bring back Bucky now that he’s got some measure of control over his life and the Cap + Falcon dreamteam is closing out the movie by going looking for him. Avengers 2: Age of Ultron can easily interrupt that search.

The major thing here, though, is that Chris Evans wants out. He’s always been a bit uneasy with his huge contract to Marvel and is one of the few members of their stable who only has a 6-movie deal. He’s only got 2 left after Avengers 2 and one of those two will definitely be Captain America 3. He also has openly discussed his intention to semi-retire from acting and go into directing.

Contrast this with Sebastian Stan who has seven movies left in his contract. It seems likely that Marvel will want to keep the character and avoid recasting while still staying within reaching distance of comics precedent. That is sort of a nutshell of the basis for this argument, but more detail to follow!

Counter-Arguments

It’s possible that if Evans and therefore Steve Rogers are slated to be in Avengers 3 (as the final film in Evans’ contract), it will mean he isn’t dead. More likely, it’ll be a flashback or some other small role. A little less likely is that his 6th appearance is in an entirely different movie but the smart money is on Avengers 3.

It’s also possible that Marvel is willing to recast Evans as they have recast actors before (Terrence Howard to Don Cheadle, Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo) and Kevin Fiege, at least, has toyed with the topic in interviews. As has Robert Downey Jr. who has been notoriously outspoken about the tension between self-interest and loyalty to Marvel’s cinematic magnum opus.

Argument from the Comics and The Winter Soldier

In the comics, Crossbones assassinates Steve Rogers (but Sharon Carter is initially blamed) and Bucky Barnes takes up the identity and the famous shield to replace him. All three of these characters originate in The Winter Soldier for the MCU and none of them are “completed”. They are all “middle movie” figures who will have to factor in later or they’re just Easter eggs.

In the movie The Winter Soldier we see that Crossbones survives the destruction of the Triskellion and we are halfway introduced to Sharon Carter (first name only). Why else but to seed the presence of these characters in the next film? More circumstantial is the way Brock Brumlow/Crossbones is handled in the movie. He at first appears to be a loyal ally of Captain America’s, but eventually seems more hostile even before Hydra reveals itself. When he tells Cap it’s “not personal” before trying to take him down, Cap retorts “it feels personal” which sets up the animosity between them. Add Crossbones potentially blaming Steve Rogers for his disfigurement and you have grounds for the guy to become a fairly active villain.

He is also within the militaristic theme that the Russos have nailed down for their contribution to the character. It follows that the Captain America films will stay with a general theme of war and soldiers just as all of Iron Man’s nemeses are dark reflections of Tony Stark, or that Thor always comes back to the relationships between Thor and his family members. Marvel is building consistently upon the character-rooted storytelling in these films.

Counter-Arguments

The presence of these characters and the way they are set up can literally be paid off any way the Russos and Marvel choose. This may seem like the obvious and natural way to do it (and the internet has been talking about it plenty, I’m not the first person to propose this I imagine), but it may not be what they do.

Concluding Remarks

I don’t usually write articles like this, but it’s kind of fun to speculate and put forth a case for where I think they are taking this character. I love the Marvel movies. I love Captain America and I hope Marvel has the guts to follow through on everything they’ve done to differentiate the way these stories are told from their comics counterparts, where the stakes and consequences are always transient. If they get cheap in these movies, they’ll lose people. They don’t need to kill Steve Rogers to prove that they’re willing to keep the MCU a consistent, momentum-having space for versions of these stories and characters, but to me it would be a good feather to pin in their cap.

Here’s my argument, once again, in a nutshell.

P1: Steve Rogers will die.

P2: Crossbones will kill him.

P3: Bucky Barnes will become Captain America.

A1: Chris Evans has 3 movies in his contract (Age of Ultron, Captain America 2 and probably Avengers 3), Sebastian Stan has 7.

A2: The Russos are building a two-part story out of Cap 2 and Cap 3 which will include characters they introduced or seeded in Cap 2 (Brock Brumlow/Crossbones, Sharon Carter, and The Winter Soldier).

A3: This is all consistent with events in the comics.

So anyway, yeah. This was fun!

Just a couple of guys living through a vampire story.

It’s popular for critics to declare that vampire films are no longer necessary, like the movie they just reviewed (usually a vampire movie, for obvious reasons) has such a defining spin on the attendant tropes that it just gets the last word. It’s a bit of critical hyperbole that is fun for two reasons, the first that it really gets the point across and the second that it is actually fun to refute the next time a vampire movie comes out and makes you say “wow”.

Afflicted is a vampire movie that ought to make you say “wow”. It is reminiscent of Chronicle, though more modestly scaled, and does for the idea of regular guys becoming vampires what that film did for the idea of regular kids getting superpowers. It’s in the “found footage” genre and uses that framing device to drive its plot and inform its fairly impressive special effects.

Though there are few characters, Derek Lee and Cliff Prowse carry the movie’s story by playing versions of themselves that go through all this earning sympathy, horror, and even envy from the audience. These guys are a couple of young, Canadian filmmakers who also wrote and directed the film.

At first seemingly amateurish, Lee’s performance keeps adding emotional layers.

The first 30 minutes of the film are a bit bumpy, like many other films in this genre. They take their time getting to “the good stuff” and quickly introduce the notion that Derek wants to travel because he has a tangle of blood vessels in his head (AVM) that could burst anytime and kill him. His loyalest friend is Cliff, a documentarian (true to life?) who wants to help Derek create a memorable and cathartic year-long round the world trip.

Early on, they encounter a woman in Paris who Derek hooks up with. Cliff and a couple of their other friends find Derek with strange wounds and the strangeness only ramps up from there. Alternating between body horror and the kind of “look what I can do!” experimentation also found in Chronicle, the film also takes its time settling on the obvious interpretation of Derek’s condition: he’s been made into a vampire.

Lee is genuinely scary when he goes feral.

Besides the fact that the conceit is interesting enough on its own, Afflicted has the added benefit of building on it to create a very minimalist but enticing vampire lore of its own. Vampires cannot die, not by gunshot or stake, and they have to feed every 5 days or risk becoming mindless feeding machines. Derek hunts Audrey (Baya Rehaz), the French girl who infected him, in a search for the truth and perhaps a way to fix things.

The interesting thing about it is by the time he even gets close to her, Derek has done heinous things either because of loss of control or out of desperation to save himself. He clings to the fiction that finding Audrey will fix everything without ever admitting that all he really wants are answers. When he gets them, they are horrifying but also liberating in some sense. As she says, you can choose who you kill and that makes a difference.

The movie has a nuanced and interesting take on the implications of vampirism.

Because Derek is so relatable, the movie evolves into a fresh and grounded take on what vampirism would be like for a normal guy. There’s the high off having superpowers, the moral reality of needing to kill, and so on. All this is channeled through Derek’s performance and the few answers he is able to find.

I’ve always wanted a movie that gives the An American Werewolf in London (or Paris) treatment to vampires. This movie is basically that and is obviously based entirely on that concept. You see a lot of vampire fiction where they are these remote beings, something abstract or supernatural to the point of occupying a moral and metaphysical space wholly apart. This is a huge part of the appeal of vampires in the first place, but Afflicted eschews the remove and reframes it as a truly gray state with real consequences in our world, both good and bad. It’s interesting that Audrey explains that being a vampire is a point of no return, that to kill is necessary if only because it keeps you from becoming worse, or accidentally making more like you.

Like I said, it’s a nice take on the idea even on the level of exploring the tropes of vampire fiction and the mythical figure of the vampire in itself. This movie isn’t especially deep, mind you, but it doesn’t just do found footage with familiar depictions of vampirism or vampires. It mixes and matches ideas and visual cues from a variety of sources, mixing Chronicle the American Werewolf movies, and so on into something that feels tangible enough to jump-start vampires as a subject, at least within its own terms and needs.

Between this and Only Lovers Left Alive, it’s like Twilight never even happened. Reminds me of the last couple years where filmmakers and writers have finally been allowed to at least try new shit with the zombie tropes and concepts (see: Warm Bodies, Deadgirl, World War Z) to varying results. If nothing else, movies that try fresh spins on old standbys at least demonstrate why those standbys seldom go away for long.

Might be Cage’s best performance in years.

David Gordon Green used to be kind of a singular filmmaker. He did movies like Snow Angels and Undertow, which is when I got into him, that share a certain rural Americana which blends the intrigue of the seemingly mundane with deeper themes and a penchant for coming of age stories. Later, he started branching into the high-concept and genre-blending comedies like Pineapple Express and Your Highness and is pretty fucking good at those too.

Joe feels like his earlier work and if you’re fan, that’s as good a reason as any to see it. On top of that, though, it features a series of truly impeccable performances and that classic mastery of the coming of age story which David Gordon Green is so good at. There’s also plenty of humor mixed into the menace, the tension, and the camaraderie at the heart of its story.

I’d like to pretend that people will notice Joe because hey it’s David Gordon Green doing what he does best, but more likely they’re going to go into it for Nicolas Cage who puts in one of his trademark out-of-nowhere-amazing performances (to be fair, this is getting a lot of attention among critics). Cage is a great, great actor and he pretty much always was. He’s just also a very eccentric, very risk-inclined one as well. Joe doesn’t feel like a gimmicky performance, as if the production is so boring that Cage has to invent insane character tics to stay interested. It feels like the confident, open work of a master. Which is what it is. As good as Gordon Green is with this kind of material, it’s Cage that claps you on the arm and grins a little through that beard and makes you feel welcome with Joe.

The other half of what makes this movie work so fucking well.

Gary (Tye Sheridan) is a tough, responsible kid stuck with a pretty shitty lot in life. His family is a mess beyond what most regular people can really appreciate, having probably never met people like them. They’re drifters, moving in and out of the decaying wilderness of rural America in pursuit of temporary landfall where Wade (Gary Poulter), his n0-account father, can drink his fill for a while before pissing people off enough to drive them out to the road once again.

They meet Joe (Nicolas Cage) when they see how he hires day-laborers, all of whom are local black guys, to poison trees so that a logging company can come in and plant timber. Though it never dwells on the socioeconomic ramifications of something like that (spare mention is made of its legality), it helps form the backdrop of this world, where poverty is as real as those trees. Joe is a fair, generous man who we see is friends with his workers just as much as their boss. This is not an exploitative thing, but a way for Joe to give some men a livelihood and keep himself out of trouble besides. He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t buy a new truck just to do it, that is a friend to his community (as scummy as they may seem), but who also has demons in his past that crop up every now and then to make life difficult for him. He’s also the kind of guy who will let his dog kill another dog because that dog annoys him. Joe never flinches from its character study, good or bad.

He went through a windshield and he doesn’t give a fuck.

Joe is very much about the intersection of those demons. As much as he wants to help Gary, and others, there are always people like Wade or Willy-Russel (Ronnie Gene Blevins, perfectly cast) to drag him down to their petty, banal brand of evil. As dangerous as Joe’s temper is, he’s not a stupid or predatory man. Unlike him, Wade is definitely predatory and as mean as they come. Poulter’s performance will remind people, I think, unsettlingly of times they’ve seen an uncle or a grandparent drunk and bitter and hateful. Likewise, Willy-Russel brings to mind every loudmouth, spiteful little coward that ever was or ever will be.

As Joe and Gary try, independently and together, to navigate these things, Joe’s grip on his temper and his vow of restraint, which he understands is the only thing that keeps him out of jail and not hurting people, they fester and boil until they can no longer be navigated. As bad as Wade and Willy-Russel are on their own, they’re way worse together and it’s in their scruffy and wicked congress that Joe finds a measure of redemption for all those times his anger and violence were misguided and did more harm than good. Joe allows its titular character to be heroic, and he’s exactly the kind of man who wrestles with himself without that adversity.

Cage is downright scary at times, bringing to mind John Hawkes’ character in Winter’s Bone.

In some sense, Gary brings out a paternal nature in Joe which also helps him be a better person. Though we see how he can be a good guy, the best scenes are always where he and Gary hang out and work. The best of these sequences is when they do a booze-cruise search for Joe’s dog. This sequence is wonderful and recalls similarly playful bits from David Gordon Green’s other films (particularly the “playing in the woods” stuff from Pineapple Express). The way he does it makes you feel that way adults seldom get to feel, like a day can last forever.

And I mean, that’s a somewhat abstract way to describe how this movie makes you feel when it isn’t going grim. It feels like good company. Not everyone has the same background I do, and I suspect that there’s a little bit of bias in my view from having grown up around people and situations that are largely less dramatic versions of Joe. So bear that in mind as you watch, if you find this all less engaging than I do.

This performance should have a trigger warning.

Joe is a quiet, subtle movie. But it’s also entertaining and engaging. People who watch it will be well satisfied by the story and the comeuppance received by various characters, as well as by the ultimate meaning of Gary and Joe’s friendship. It’s a good story well told, in other words.

It is very reminiscent of Mud and makes for a nice companion piece, not just because Tye Sheridan plays similar roles in both movies. Interestingly, Mud has a little more of the vaguely mythic sense that Undertow had and is a bit more surprising in terms of where its story ultimately goes. If you liked Mud, though, chances are you’ll enjoy its slightly meatier cousin.

Hey, nice to see Chalk Opponent in a movie again.

If The Raid was raw, lean, and hyperkinetic then its sequel could be described as methodical, precise, and operatic. In every way conceivable, The Raid 2: Berandal is a bigger movie than its predecessor. It’s nothing short of an epic and often feels like the kind of film that Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese would make together, mostly because there are shout outs to the films and style of both those directions in Berandal. Among other homages.

If you had to compare it to another movie, I’d stop short of going to The Raid and start with The Departed. Gareth Evans who wrote, directed, and edited this (and the first one of course), seems to know where to use well-worn tropes like “undercover cop” deftly, with a minimalist touch that keeps the focus on the ride more than the pathos. This works well in Berandal‘s favor and the film is allowed to have more genuine emotionality and depth than its muscular predecessor did. The Raid‘s story was simple, straightforward, and minimalist enough to serve the point of the film: a crazy amount of action. But by the end, it surprised you by adding a layer of depth with its underlying tale of two brothers on opposite sides of the law. In Berandal, the story and characters are as much the focus as the martial arts choreography and Evans’ trademark eye for authentically brutal violence.

Because it tops The Raid in sheer quantity of fights, chases, shootouts, and “holy fuck” moments of camera/choreographed wizardry, it has to take the belt as the new “pretty much greatest action  film ever made”. But saying that about The Raid required some qualifying due to its tight focus on being just that. Berandal requires no qualifiers. I’ll always have a soft spot for The Raid and perhaps prefer rewatching it over Berandal (but who really knows), but Berandal is the greatest action film ever made.

This movie has way more characters and moving parts in its relatively elaborate story.

While watching Berandal, it’s easy to notice that you’re watching a movie. Action sequences of this kind sort of make you take a figurative step back and marvel at them, at the technical aspects as much as the visceral effect. But Berandal is also a movie where, if you’re taking that step back, you might also marvel at the intricacy and confidence of its story. By no means is this tale of gangland Jakarta some revolutionary new take on the genre, and like I said before: it owes a lot to other movies. That said, though, it’s just fresh enough and totally well told that you may be surprised that you’re just as excited to see how the threads are going to come together as you are to see some more ridiculous ass-kicking.

On a thematic level, Berandal is mostly about generational angst. In this film’s Jakarta, there’s been peace between the major crime syndicates for ten years. Mostly because Bangun (Tio Pakusodewo) maintains respectful ties with his main rival, Japanese import Goto (Ken’ichi Endô). The trouble is, Bangun’s son Uco (Arifin Putra) is ambitious, petulant, and reckless… and he wants his turn at the big chair to come sooner than his father does. Bangun knows what his son is, and it’s hard not to feel sympathy even for a big evil crime boss when you see his resignation over it manifest itself in every interaction they have. Outside of the power dynamics between Bangun and Goto, there’s a new up and comer with a colorful and dangerous entourage. Bejo (Alex Abbad) is the new kid on the block. He’s frail, composed, and feels like a character straight out of Kill Bill (there’s a lot of that in this movie) or a Park Chan-Wook movie.

In the opening minutes of the film, Bejo shows how much he thinks about Bangun’s slipping authority.

Rama (Iko Uwais) is picked up minutes after the events of The Raid and convinced by a duplicitous senior cop to go undercover and get the corrupt police who let guys like Bangun and Bejo play their games and ruin the whole city. Rama is super reluctant, for understandable reasons, but he has to do it to protect his family. The only trouble is, he’s asked from minute one to do pretty bad things in order to get this done. That means that the incorruptible morality and conscience that were his defining features up to this point start off pulled apart. He beats a guy who got Uco thrown in prison and gets tossed there himself, his supposedly months-long assignment getting turned into years as he does everything he can to protect Uco and get a reputation as the dangerous, but loyal Yuda.

Rama is, on paper, a similar character to Billy in The Departed or even Nikolai in Eastern Promises. But rather than dwelling on the existential question of how far is too far in order to protect his identity and still get the job done, Berandal eventually eschews any question of Rama going native and instead focuses on a more unusual question: why is he really doing this? It’s subtle and a bit undercooked due to how much attention this film has to pay to other characters and story beats, but it seems clear to me that Rama is caught between conflicting motives. Sometimes it’s his desire for revenge against Bejo, who killed his criminal brother Andi (Donny Alamsyah) in the first minutes of the movie. Sometimes it’s protecting his family, especially his son who is now a toddler he hasn’t been around for. Deep down, though, I think the movie lands on that morality and conscience. Rama can’t let the cops or the criminals hurt people just to achieve their goals. Rama is like a throat punch to that familiar narrative of moral compromise, gray justice, and so on.

The prison riot scene is fucking crazy.

By the end of the film, you’re not really sure where you’re going to be left. Bejo and Uco manufacture a war between Bangun and the Japanese, putting everyone at risk and forcing Rama to do what is necessary to stay alive and clean house. I was surprised by how cleanly Berandal tied up its loose ends. You might have expected it to sequel bait for The Raid 3 (already being discussed as a likely project) but it doesn’t go for that. It has a real ending instead.

Along the way, the ride is just insane. You almost get fight fatigue from the sheer range, intensity, and thrill of this film’s action sequences. Every time you think that’s it, they can’t top that… they go and do. Especially the final sequence, where Rama’s position on all this nonsense coheres into a need to fight everyone. So then he does, and it’s the kind of thing where you’re hoping it will happen, but very aware that the movie could very well go less over the top than you feel ready for. This is a way, way more over the top film than The Raid, but it also knows exactly how to satisfy its audience. So yes, in other words, Rama fights Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle) and Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman) at the same time. Then he fights this movie’s version of Mad Dog, The Assassin (Cecep Arif Rahman) like immediately afterward in what has to be the most brutal, tense, and kinetic knife fight ever put to film.

These guys feel like they stepped out of a different film and landed in this one, but because Bejo is so theatrical, the movie makes them work.

Because of the increased budget and expanded scope, something worth mentioning is how often Evans uses setting and environment to inform his fights. Many critics, myself included, described the fights in The Raid as having narrative arcs, as being mini-performances and stories all their own. Good fights tell a story, and are usually composed in “moments of no return” (also called Acts) just like any book, movie, or comic. In The Raid, this element was probably more noticeably due to the sparseness of the environment. Here, the environment also informs the story and many of the set-pieces feel almost like characters. The hallway where Rama fights HG and BBM, the kitchen where he fights the Assassin, and especially the nightclub where Prakoso (Yayan Ruhian who also played Mad Dog in The Raid) is assaulted by an army of machete-wielding thugs.

Prakoso is actually a good example of how Berandal adds layers to its characters and narrative. Bangun’s top hitman, Prakoso is basically a homeless man who only kills for the money to support his son and his ex, who understandably disapproves of his lifestyle choices. Prakoso is a sad, but loyal man and Berandal offers up that portrait so that you care about him when Uco uses him as a sacrifice to fuel the gang war Bejo convinces him to start.

He looks like an Indonesian Harold Perrineau, and he’s having a baaaad day.

At the end of the day, you watch The Raid 2: Berandal for the fights much like some watch romantic comedies for the tension of will they/won’t they. The appeal of a movie like this magnifies when it bothers to tell a story, let alone an exceptional one. The fights, in other words, are better if they’re in service to something. This makes Gareth Evans’ Indonesian films the proper successors to the Hong Kong action cinema of yesteryear, where similar attention was often paid to story, even if the tropes are familiar to us. There’s a reason why this shit works.

There’s also a reason why it continues to be an embarrassment to the infinitely more expensive films cranked out by Hollywood committees. That said, The Winter Soldier shows what Hollywood can do when projects are in the right hands. Berandal shows that there’s a world outside that, and that it may very well be the more exciting if your areas of interest align with the hard work and passion of guys like Gareth Evans and his crazy outfit of actors, fighters, and choreographers in Indonesia.

Yeesh.

There are few scenes where these two are separate.

I’m not sure anyone really expected this movie to be good. Doug Liman, who directed, is kind of a middle-of-the-road guy and the movie had more than two writers, which is usually a bad sign (outside of comedies… sometimes). Bucking expectations, perhaps, Edge of Tomorrow is one of the best “original” (it’s adapted from a Japanese novel, which makes a lot of sense really) scifi action films in recent memory. If there’s any fairness, it’ll be an instant classic but it looks like it is destined to be discovered somewhere down the line, ignored in its time. This is strangely fitting, I think, since movie buffs celebrate the movies of the 80′s that it most resembles.

Rather than focusing on complex metaphysical questions posed by its central conceit, a sort of Groundhog’s Day scenario, the film focuses on fun. This works way better than it would have had Edge of Tomorrow been set up as just another action epic. With a huge dose of charm and comedy in the mix, everything else that works about the movie is underlined. The performances, special effects, and creature design are all top notch. The design of the Mimics, especially, is surprisingly good.

All that said, I think Edge of Tomorrow sets itself up for a lot of bitching about its ending. This is perhaps fair enough as the ending feels like a cookie-cutter “Hollywood” ending to be sure. That is, until you think about why it could possibly work. Then you wind up surprised and impressed at how tightly it conforms to the internal logic of the movie, an element that it seems to flout in favor of being a roaring good time. It’s nice that, when you stop to think about it for any length of time, a movie like this holds up. Most of the time, you’re in a situation like with X-Men: Days of Future Past or Godzilla where, the more you think about the internal logic, the dumber the movie feels.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW AGAIN AND AGAIN

Tom Cruise is Major William Cage, perfectly named to align with a sort of 80′s energy I think this movie (perhaps unintentionally) evokes. He’s part of the branch of the military that sells victory to the civilians. He goes on TV and talks about how badass the “Newjacket” exoskeleton technology is and how a woman called the Angel of Verdun used it to slaughter the alien “Mimics” like no one had ever done before.

Europe is pretty much conquered by a sort of viral alien species that operates somewhat like an ant colony or virus (the better analogy, which the film uses). Since humans were booted out, they’ve been trying to form up enough might to invade mainland Europe from Britain. The situation is reminiscent of WW2 which should not be a surprise given the release date of the film. I think they were trying to evoke some of that WW2 feeling, but this is absolutely NOT a “greatest generation” or even all that militaristic a movie.

Cage is a huge weasel at first, but he gradually (we don’t know how gradually) becomes something more.

Which brings me to the 80′s thing. The military, and much of the tech (babble and nology both) are used for utility. I mean, you might question that the military efforts against the Mimics amounts to a bunch of infantry in powered armor with no tank support, air superiority, etc. But the dual realization that this is both an 80′s movie and an adaptation of a Japanese novel is enough to make you roll with it, I think.

Edge of Tomorrow, it turns out, is very much like the fun “80′s” tradition of action-scifi movies (Aliens, for example). It doesn’t have the synthy score, unfortunately, but it does have the sense of fun about itself which flirts with but ultimately never becomes true camp. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is very much a movie of our time but you can see the choices skewing away from stuff like realism with its military elements, which is something we take for granted given the pervasiveness of militarism in our culture this last decade or so. I mean, most people have a strong enough sense of military stuff to scratch their heads about the tactics in this movie. Some will probably decide this is a stupid movie based on that alone. I pity them because they’re missing the reasoning behind the choice.

Anyway. Cage pisses off General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) who is sending him to the front for the big invasion of Europe. Cage tries to get out of it but ends up having to join J Squad, full of misfits, under the command of Sgt Farrel (a super entertaining Bill Paxton, another sign that they are very much evoking 80′s movies). With J Squad, Cage is supposed to help turn the tide of a war that is not going humanity’s way due to the Mimics’ ability to anticipate them. Instead, the battle is a disaster with the Mimics laying a big ol’ ambush. Cage and everyone in his squad dies, but before he goes out Cage kills an “Alpha” mimic and gets its magic blue blood all up on him.

The big invasion is intentionally and hugely reminiscent of D-Day.

Then he wakes up, exactly 24 hours (this is important, by the way) prior. This Groundhog’s Day stuff is explained, and works rather well as a bit of scifi magic with its own rules. The alien central intelligence has limited powers over time, able to “reset” a day when an Alpha dies. This is how it anticipates humanity’s actions and due to getting the blood on him, Cage can now trigger the resets by dying.

Only one other person has had this happen to them: Rita, the Angel of Verdun herself (Emily Blunt), who Cage eventually meets by trying to save her life. This is a recurrant idea in the film, by the way, and very cleverly allows these characters to have a relationship in spite of the temporal conditions set by the Reset ability. Cage meets and befriends Rita many times, and is forced to watch her die over and over. Their relationship, especially its romantic elements, are also cleverly underplayed and felt mostly through small actorly moments Cruise delivers at the full height of his powers.

That sword is no joke.

With the help of Rita and Carter (Noah Taylor), a physicist who has more or less figured the Mimics out and been discredited as a result, Cage lives through enough days to train and plan ways to get at what they call the “Omega”, the central brain of the Mimic invasion. If they can take it out, they’ll win the war.

Edge of Tomorrow gets tons of mileage out of its concept but reuses shots and scenes sparingly, or tries to give us some new fun spin. Almost every time Cage dies, there’s a solid laugh as he almost always dies unexpectedly and almost always dies while letting out this frightened yelp that is just hilarious somehow.

Have you ever seen that episode of Supernatural where Dean dies over and over? That’s what this is like, except there’s exoskeletal battle suits.

Speaking of Cage’s many funny deaths, this movie should remind people why Tom Cruise was and is a big deal. The guy is 50 and he’s probably one of the few middle-aged actors capable of convincingly doing this kind of movie. He’s got so much heart, for lack of a better word, that he’s entertaining to watch even in drek like Knight & Day. In even his bad movies, he’s the best thing about them. I’ve always been a fan of his and after the unfairly maligned Oblivion, this movie feels like a bit of vindication. Especially since it sometimes feels like I’m the only person in the world who saw Ghost Protocol, which is probably the true beginning of this new phase of his career. Anyway, beyond his own watchability it’s the generosity he shows for other actors, in this case Emily Blunt.

It’s not that she wouldn’t hold the movie without him, though. Blunt is ridiculously good here. So physical, so badass, and so beautiful.

Rita is also her own fully-formed character independent of Cage, and acts in a mentorship capacity throughout the film. But because Cruise makes room for Blunt to fully realize this character, she frequently upstages him and easily gives the audience the impression that this whole movie could be about her, or they could easily have done the Battle of Verdun instead of this. That is a great thing for two reasons. First off, having both these actors playing these characters sympatico gives us the best of both. Secondly, that room for imagining other stories and history, especially for Rita since most of it is delivered subtly and in brief moments or remarks, means that Edge of Tomorrow feels like a movie of co-leads, where the female warrior is as central as the male and not defined by a love story (though there are elements of this here).

In fact, I’d say this could be a breakout role for Blunt. She’s already pretty popular, but never as a full on action heroine. I think Edge of Tomorrow, good as it is on its own and good as it is for her, might open up a whole avenue of different roles for her. She’s also a fantastic actress, unlike Jessica Biel who once had a similar opportunity to morph into the all-too-rare action heroine.

Cage tries to keep Rita alive, but she is never sacrificed, as a character, in service of his heroism. She is always an equal in every way but that the story is from Cage’s point of view. This may not be everything, but it’s something.

Going to the ending, it would be dishonest of me to pretend like I didn’t need it explained to me to understand why it works. At face value, it seems like a cheat to give Cage and Rita a happy ending where some of the understated (beautifully done) potential between them can be explored after the credits roll. It’s an appropriate reward for all they’ve done, maybe, but it also feels like a magical ending that defies the time loop rules the film has been using.

At face value.

My roommate brought up the fact that the day always resets at the same time. The difference is that, at the end, the fact that the war ends puts Cage in a different location and circumstance than he was in when the reset occurs. At first we thought that it was about the hours, that the time of death determined how far you went back but then why is Cage always waking up at the same time of day no matter when he dies? I assume this is because the Omega has a fixed position to return to. When its blood gets on Cage, it sends him back to that same position but everything else has changed.

I grant that this isn’t airtight, but the alternative is that the Omega’s blood is different from that of the Alphas and sends him back slightly less far. As you can see, either way relies on a lot of guesswork but I suspect that the schematics of this ending are in the film, just maybe more noticeable on a 2nd viewing than on the first.

EDIT: I think I’ve figured this out. Someone reminded me that the first scene in the movie is Cage waking up on the helicopter. This seems to indicate that the ability’s reset point is the last time he woke up. This means that, in the “invasion” reality he keeps waking up at the barracks. In this new “victory” reality, he would never get tazed, arrested, and wake up there. He’d reset to the last time he woke up before that: in the helicopter on the way to Whitehall.

Still not 100% sure why the Mimics are gone in the reset reality, though. I guess it has something to do with it actually being just Cage’s memories that are sent back to the reset point. From what I understand, the novel (called All You Need is Kill) expressly states that this is how it works. Anyway! The more you know.

Either way, the happy ending doesn’t really ruin the movie. It’s too strong for that and it closes the ending as best as it can, with a crooked grin from Cruise that sells every ounce of his potentially years of memories of this woman colliding with her eternally brusque first words to him. It’s a beautiful moment.

Can’t wait to make that out of Lego.

Getting to things that are cool and unabashedly service nerdy entertainment value now, let me mention the Newjacket suits and the creatures.

The Newjacket suits are probably one of the best uses of “mecha” in a movie thus far. Being essentially powered armor, they occupy a space in the mecha spectrum that hasn’t really been done in a movie before. Elysium came close but Edge of Tomorrow blows it away. The movie infuses these suits with character, by the way, showing us how the soldiers decorate or modify them.

The Mimics, named for their uncanny ability to predict human behavior and tactics, sometimes feel like an update on sentinels from The Matrix trilogy, but their movements feel wholly different and they are organic in a special, otherworldly way. They seem to pulsate and squiggle like they’re only half present in our universe. It’s a very cool effect, especially early on when you first see them. They did a good job in the marketing keeping them out of focus so that the surprise is intact for the audience.

Speaking of marketing…

…it kind of feels like Edge of Tomorrow was under-served. Similar to Pacific Rim, the marketing only really spoke to people with a vested interest either in the actors or in the concepts featured. The trailers had little plot, little focus on the opposition and stakes, etc. Pacific Rim’s marketing had somewhat different issues, but on the whole I’d say both sets fail their respective films by not ever getting at what makes them work or special. For Edge of Tomorrow, it’s the dark comedy and authenticity of Cage’s character arc that should have been front and center.

For gamers, Edge of Tomorrow may yield a special dose of vindication as it is probably the best mesh of video game concepts with cinematic narrative and aesthetics yet seen. There’s something so familiar about Cage’s deaths, respawns, and attendant improvement in skill. Without putting too fine a point on it, he’s essentially living Borderlands which makes Edge of Tomorrow almost a video game movie, or at least the first movie that really takes advantage of the hybdridization of the two mediums (more prevalent in games).

Edge of Tomorrow is a great film. The special kind of big genre movie that gets better the more you think about it, instead of the other way around. That’s my favorite kind of “big” movie, really, and it so often goes that other way.

Every bit as gorgeous as the first movie.

How to Train Your Dragon came at a time when Dreamworks had a loooong way to go to close the gap with Pixar. Back then, Pixar was pretty much the only game in town. How to Train Your Dragon was the first American animated film to really challenge their reign, not just in terms of popularity (a much easier target) but in terms of artistry, quality, and substance. In fact, Dragon felt very much like a Pixar movie in its combination of the fantastic with a warm, human story enriching for both kids and adults.

Now comes How to Train Your Dragon 2 (I’ll refer to it henceforth as Dragon 2) and it too surprises by being another Dreamworks sequel that not only meets the quality of its predecessor pound for pound, but in many ways exceeds it. A few years ago, I was stunned and delighted by just how fucking good Kung Fu Panda 2 was, especially compared to its good-not-great predecessor. This time, I was ready for Dreamworks to again attempt to outdo themselves with an animation and story team that had actually made a great-just-great movie the first time around. All praise to Dean DeBlois, a fellow Canuck, for raising his script and the directing to a new level.

They pull it off here, in other words. Big time. It’s at least as well told a story, with just the same degree of care and attention paid to its ridiculous world. There’s a fine line to walk with this material, with the colorful and cartoonish characters set against a fairly realistic environment. In the world of How to Train Your Dragon, you can get cut and bleed. You can die or lose a limb. Your clothes are made of material that has substance. But the dragons are like something out of Dr. Zeuss and the world as fantastical as they come. One of the things that most exhilarates about these films is that the attention to a level of realism warrants visceral reactions to physical exploits especially (but not limited to) in the case of flight. The juxtaposition seems difficult to maintain, let alone create, but once you realize how well it works for these movies, it’s astonishing.

Stoic is my favorite role of Butler’s.

Being a sequel, Dragon 2 goes back to some of the dynamics that drove the first film. Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is again at odds with his father over expectations versus what Hiccup wants for himself. Five years have passed since Hiccup brought peace to Berk and environs, uniting both the Vikings and the Dragons in a symbiotic, harmonious relationship. In a time of peace, Stoic is preparing to lay down his helmet and let Hiccup assume the mantle of Chief.

This is more than just a title. Thematically, Dragon 2 is telling a subsequent chapter in a larger “coming of age” tale. One that is relevant to anyone, but especially young men. Stoic is asking Hiccup to rise up and be responsible, not only for himself and his own dreams, but for others. He’s asking Hiccup to be selfless, in other words, appealing to what is best and most precious in the traditional conceptions of masculinity. Some would question that, asking why this is required or valuable. I’d say that there’s enough representations and endorsements of toxic masculinity in contemporary fiction that it’s plain refreshing to have something that accepts the utility of gender norms while discarding the damaging baggage. In many ways, Dragon 2 is about that conflict for my gender. In many ways, it questions the relationship between various expectations and ideas associated with masculinity.

At the same time, it’s also the story of a heroic boy and his heroic dragon.

While Stoic is grooming Hiccup to replace him, Hiccup is preoccupied with exploration. With dragons, the Vikings can go further and see more than they ever have before. Hiccup is always looking over that next horizon, finding new lands and mapping them, always in search of more dragons. Along the way, he stumbles across a plot by a feared Viking to rule all dragons and thus the world.

Drago Bloodfist (Djimon Hounsou) is a terrifying man. He’s singular in vision and will. He represents the corruption of power, showing Hiccup and us an example of what a man can become if possessed of his own will to dominate. The first to stand in his path is a mysterious dragon rider who turns out to be Valka (Cate Blanchett), Hiccup’s estranged mother who has become almost as much dragon as woman. The family dynamics drove How to Train Your Dragon just as they do here, only this time balancing Hiccup’s discovery of himself through his mother and father, rather than in opposition to them. He’s a little of both, it turns out.

Together, they try to stop Drago and save Berk and the dragons from tyranny. It’s a simple formula that yields a fairly epic story. The one flaw I’d point out, and it’s potentially minor, is that the focus on Hiccup and his parents leaves little room for character development for anyone else. Though they were similarly shallow characters in Dragon, Hiccup’s Viking peers don’t get near as much to do here. They’re always kind of around, but they’re never pivotal. Even Astrid (America Ferrara) ends up having more chemistry and weight in her friendship with Ellet son of Ellet (Kit Harrington) than she does with Hiccup. Well, with the exception of one beautiful little couple scene they get together. That scene actually gets young love right in a way that kids’ movies, particularly in the tradition of Disney or Pixar animation, never ever do.

It’s sickening, adorable, familiar, and true all at the same time.

Getting back to the themes of the film for a while, I want to generate a bit more substance behind my claims about Dragon 2‘s gender politics. And make no mistake, it has gender politics. Rather than being about equality between the sexes, it does for masculinity what Brave does for femininity. It’s actually a wonderful counterpart to that film and, strangely enough, Noah. In some ways, Tubal-Cain and Drago are the same archetype, with Hiccup being stuck in the middle between the destructive, narcissistic selfish internalism occasionally encouraged in masculine self-image (and representation) and the better way, the way of the father, provider, protector, and selfless leader. It’s a bit of Great Man fallacy and it’s a bit of YA power fantasy, but it’s still presenting a portrait of masculinity that is not damaging to young men or boys. And that’s something. It’s unequivocal in its rejection of violence, fear, control over others, etc. It offers up a story about being a positive example, even if adversity doesn’t negotiate.

Unlike Ham in Noah, Hiccup’s conflict isn’t really about which kind of man he wants to be. He’s never tempted over to Drago’s side, not really. Instead, his conflict is about what to do about it. This makes a lot of difference. Hiccup sees himself as a peacekeeper. If he can change Berk and the dragons, why can’t he do it again? By centering his storyline on this conflict, the movie gains a layer of insight and substance. It is at once acknowledging its nature as a sequel (why not do the same thing all over again? tell the same story twice!) as well as the important lesson for all young people that sometimes the grown-ups are right. Sometimes realizing this is how you start to grow up yourself.

There’s also that facing reflections of yourself, whatever their nature, can tell you a lot about you.

But what about the dragons in the fucking dragon movie, you ask me. Yes, the dragons. They are awesome. Especially the giant kaiju-like ones. The Bewilderbeasts. This movie plays with ideas of hierarchy, control, and dissent so cleverly that you almost miss how it reflects back to the core story and characters. Toothless and Hiccup have essentially the same arc. Both of them have to rise to the occasion and become adults, with adult responsibilities. Hiccup does this by accepting that idealism has to be tempered with responsibility and reason. Toothless does this by choosing the freedom and companionship of his life with humans over the domination of the larger, more powerful dragons. Neither can make these choices alone, which is why their story so nicely folds them into each other.

It’s impossible not to love these two.

I care about this thematic and meta stuff. Not everybody does. I think it elevates this film into truly special heights, well worth long conversations about gender and positive/negative representation. I also think it’s a fantasy epic as good as any other, presenting us with great world-building, amazing visuals, and a stunning score. It’s a rousing, entertaining film. It’s got the laughs, the heart, and the action. What else can you want? It’s just nice when there’s also all this delicious narrative meat. I’m a narrative meat carnivore. A narrativore.

I’m not really sure if Dragon 2 will be thought of as better than the first one. It’s possible that it deserves that, objectively. But in terms of seeing the bar and raising it another notch, I’d give it that for sure. On a purely emotional, subjective, and personal level… I judge their relative quality by how close I get to tears when some stirring shit happens. In the first film, the bit where Hiccup and Toothless first succeed in flying together totally does it for me. The wonder, awe, and beauty of that sequence can still bring a tear to the eye or a chill to the spine. Dragon 2 has many, many scenes that accomplish the same or similar feelings, not only due to spectacle but due to genuine emotional intelligence and moving, somber scenes balanced against that spectacle.

These movies are fully formed things. They aren’t just excuses to design cartoon dragons that look like they’re just waiting to become toys. They aren’t just excuses to say “Pixar isn’t the only game in town”. That’s awesome if you ask me.

Isn’t he cute.

There’s this subgenre to kids’ movies and science fiction where one or more kids befriend an alien. The most iconic of these movies is E.T. and, honestly, it’s never really been matched. It remains the pinnacle of the genre. A few years ago, JJ Abrams took a literal approach to updating the subgenre with Super 8, closely emulating the tone and texture of E.T. but ultimately failing to evoke that same soft magic.

It’s possible that E.T. will maintain its crown for some time to come, especially because the world has moved on. That said, Earth to Echo perhaps comes the closest. If I had to attribute it to any one aspect, it’d be that Echo boils the formula down to essentials. It eschews the distractions of, say, Transformers (which, believe it or not, is also part of this genre) and doesn’t bother with Spielberg either. Earth to Echo is very much its own thing.

Earth to Echo is, like Chronicle, a found-footage movie about kids dealing with the extraordinary. It feels a little like Chronicle, really, and embraces the same proliferation of recording and communications technology (videophone, etc) that the next crop of adolescents will grow up with. Echo, the alien, is barely in the movie and features more as a symbol and catalyst than a full character. This doesn’t hamper the movie, though, as its focus on the three main kids and their friendship is strong enough to carry the movie.

It sort of looks like a big dildo, I know.

In a Nevada suburb live three friends: Tuck (Astro), Alex (Teo Halm), and Munch (Reese Hartwig). Their neighborhood is being bought up and sold off so a freeway can be constructed. Tuck is the narrator and documentarian of the group, owning a pile of cameras he uses to record their adventures and maintain a memory of them as the situation means they’ll ultimately have to part ways. After he introduces his friends, Tuck tells us that things have been a little weird in their suburb for a while, especially with phones that are producing strange electrostatic images.

As an excuse for one last adventure together, they follow the images by comparing them to a map of the Nevada desert. They track it and find Echo, a tiny owl-like alien who desperately needs their help. Echo can communicate through beeps and lights but needs their camera phones to see and to tell them how to help him. Because he is bio-mechanical, Echo needs his vehicle or capsule to be repaired before he has the strength to return home with his larger intergalactic spaceship.

The movie therefore follows a sort of scavenger hunt model where, in this one night, the kids have to track down Echo’s missing pieces while evading their parents and the somewhat sinister “construction workers” who seem entirely too interested in what’s messing up peoples’ phones and causing all the local weirdness.

Eventually, Echo starts getting better.

Found-footage is a filmmaking technique (I don’t think it’s fair to call it a gimmick anymore) that can be divisive, but I think movies like Chronicle and Earth to Echo show how it can be rooted in character. In Chronicle, Andrew uses cameras to hold the world at bay. In Echo, Tuck and his friends use them to hold on to each other, knowing that their time together is coming to an end. Alongside this, which I think is an admirable use of the technique really, there’s that found-footage can be used to mark generation. By that I mean how, even more than in Chronicle, it feels normal for Tuck and his friends to be into cameras, phones, and tech. They’re thirteen year olds in 2014 and this sort of thing captures that idea just as well as the kids playing D&D in E.T. captures their moment in time.

Earth to Echo’s strongest suit, though, is not how well it uses found-footage. Rather, it’s how well the movie builds rapport between the characters and the audience. Each of the kids gets time to be a full character, even if some of the context they’re given is simplistic or familiar. This means that they have family dynamics, backstories, flaws, and virtues and it’s all accessible and important. I was surprised by how well it worked, really, and how seamlessly it’s all communicated to the audience.

The movie couldn’t have been very expensive, but they get a lot of mileage out of the VFX.

I was also surprised by how the dynamics of the trio were allowed to be different than expected, with relation to their role in the movie. I also like that the movie shook things up. For example, Tuck seems like the natural “main” character out of the three, who will have the largest connection to the events as they transpire. That’s not the case here. It’s Alex, an adopted kid with deep abandonment issues and masked vulnerabilities, who forges the strongest connection with Echo. Tuck winds up being the narrator, more than anything, with Munch providing a great deal of the comic relief and neutral voice of reason to balance his more passionate friends. Beyond this, the inclusion of a fourth kid, Emma (Ella Wahlestedt), goes as far as Echo does in exploding the dynamics as we’ve seen them and adding new dimension and depth to all the characters. And that’s really what this movie is all about: exploring the dynamics of this three-way friendship and why it’s worthwhile even in the shadow of its ending.

Unfortunately Emma isn’t in the movie as much as the lads, but even so she gets a similar respect and attention which manifests as contextualization. She’s a privileged kid with overly proper parents, but she craves something more and she’s got nerve and strength of character underneath the prim image. Simple, right? Nothing new, right? But it’s the way the movie rolls this stuff into itself rather than stopping to dwell or emphasize that works so well for it. This stuff just feels natural and that the kids are all pretty good actors keeps it that way throughout.

Out of context, this picture is sort of odd and hilarious and symbolic.

Earth to Echo is a very gratifying movie to watch, as a parent. It’s smart and poised enough to give something to the adults in the audience while also respecting the intelligence and imagination of the kids. It may not make you feel nostalgic for E.T. (not that it intends to do this), but it’ll certainly make you feel a sense of loss for your own childhood friendships. The adventures, the promises, and the stubborn refusal to admit it’s all going to end someday. That’s strong stuff, and presented here with a good mix of passion. Earth to Echo is largely about the acceptance that things have to change, so what’s important is doing what you can while you can.

Though it’s a pretty great movie, Earth to Echo is probably going to be overlooked. It has almost no buzz, after all, and I think the trailers made the concept feel a little more “me too” than the movie turns out to be. If anything, the found-footage meets kids-befriend-alien marriage is just a chrysalis this movie embodies. That emphasizes how packaging, technique, and so on rarely matter so much as a good story well told.

In other words, don’t let that stuff get in the way. Go see Earth to Echo.

I wish the whole movie was basically Analyze That with fucking Optimus De Niro and Mark Wahlberg just like psychoanalyzing this ridiculously unhinged robot.

I no longer have a solid grasp of what the consensus on the Transformers movies is. I used to think people understood that these are Bad Movies, all their redeeming qualities diminished with each successive entry in what has to be the most cynical, belligerent, and surreal movie franchise of all time. That said, I also understood that people enjoyed this, that the Transformers movies, despite being Bad Movies, were never to be missed. To not see one in theaters? Unthinkable. If only because it’s so fun to talk about them afterward. Now, that’s not everybody’s cup of tea of course, but I really thought that’s where most thinking people were at about this shit.

Then I heard the audience I saw this movie with unironically, I believe, applauding it at the end. That’s when my moorings came loose and reality became a cold, dark place.

Well, not really. I’m usually the first person to extoll those virtues that Michael Bay brings to the table, and those virtues are all present in Age of Extinction. That said, it’s also got most of his usual penchant for dizzying displays of heightened, self-important nonsense. There’s a lot of people who are going to walk out of this movie going “Remember that bit from x Transformers movie? At least they didn’t do that this time.” as if we’re focus grouping this shit. As if the entirety of Western Civilization is just a bunch of beta testers to help Bay et al get this dysfunctional shit to a point where just watching it doesn’t make us feel dirty.

But what do I know. My audience laughed uproariously at TJ Miller being unable to throw a football. As if they’ve never seen this before. I laughed uproariously at Mark Wahlberg, still beefy from Pain & Gain (the kind of movie Bay should always be making), running around in spectacles and a white lab coat.

And that’s when shit got awkward.

Mark Wahlberg tries his ass off to make this work. Alas.

Five years after the events of Dark of the Moon, the government has decided that all transformers are jihadists. Or at least the Decepticons are. A CIA task force called Cemetery Wind has been hunting down all transformers regardless of affiliation. We’re treated to a scene of Ratchet, of all robotic people, being killed in a pretty horrifying manner. Just so we know how real shit has got.

The task force is led by Frasier, who is tired of serving the country for a government salary, and Titus Welliver who just hates transformers because his sister lived in Chicago and is implied to be dead. Okay then.

Optimus Prime is hiding out and everyone is looking for him. This is because Lockdown, a transformer with contempt for everything, has been paid to hunt him down and bring him back into the fold. Whatever that means. The movie has very little time for the lore it uses like a dirty rag, simply to make some overture of mopping up its sloppy plotting. We’ll get to that a little later.

Titus Welliver don’t got time for your shit.

Because the transformers are never really treated as people, all of these movies are filled with human characters. Okay, fair enough. I’ve always understood why Bay and Ehren Kruger (who is committing crimes against humanity writing these movies) make humans the emotional heart. These guys just can’t bring themselves to have CG animated robots as “people” with character arcs, emotionality, etc. None of these guys have seen Wall-E. C-3P0 and R2D2? Pffft. Gay.

The problem is that these human characters are almost always extraneous, dopey, and barely have character arcs themselves. And when the transformers do get to talk or have emotions, it’s this weirdly pared down “I’ll kill you!” snarling and false “badassery” that makes a badass-respecting motherfucker like me just cringe. I mean, Michael Bay knows from badassery. You ever see The Rock? Bad Boys? What in fuck happened.

Age of Extinction is maybe the weirdest of the franchise, but certainly follows the formula set out by the earlier movies. At the center of this one is unlikely Texan inventor Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) who just wants to make robots but kind of sucks at it and so can’t make ends meet. His daughter, played by an oompa loompa (some call her Nicola Peltz) for diversity reasons, insists that she wants a normal life where she can date boys and keep her house. Fair enough, but Cade’s defining characteristic is contrariness, which I guess is Bay’s characterization of Texas. He is also all about turning “mistakes”, which is how they frequently refer to his orange-toned spawn, into something a notch or two above that.

This is why he helps Optimus Prime. That and, I guess, scientific curiosity? For a movie that literally ends on an anti-scientific note, I guess we were off to a good start.

This robot dinosaur basically scares Steve Jobs into submission. I don’t know how to explain this to you.

Because two CIA bad guys, Buff Yaeger and Orange Yaeger, and Irish Boyfriend (Shane Dyson or some kind of sexy Seth Rogen clone) aren’t enough human characters (they have a quota I guess), there’s also Steve Jobs (Stanley Tucci) who is a futurist technomogul that is benefiting directly from the work of Cemetary Wind, his ex-girlfriend, Chinese assistant, and poor TJ Miller who really deserves better than this. The movie therefore euthanizes him early on.

Because Bay can take criticism, he decided to push the art department to better differentiate the designs of the different transformers. Apparently this also means removing any and all subtlety. John Goodman’s Hound is a fat, cigar-chomping sergeant who sheds bullets and grenades like fleas. Ken Watanabe’s Drift (for fuck’s sake) is literally a samurai. It’s not offensive the way Skid and Mudflaps were, but it’s still (in the case of Drift at the very least) racist as shit. I mean, this is a movie where any Chinese person on screen for more than a minute gets to have a martial arts scene.  So, you know, there’s that also.

I’m serious about that. It’s as if this very “American” movie, which is kind of America: The Movie, can’t help but recycle these stereotypes. It’s like the only real question is, if you’re going to have Chinese characters… how can they not know Kung Fu? There’s a kind of twelve year old innocence to that, I guess, which I wish was more present behind some of the other shit going on in this movie. And that twelve year old thinks America is best thought of as draping one’s naked and pasty white body with the stars and stripes whilst shotgunning beers, and shotguns, and swinging one’s dick at foreigners whilst laughing uproariously (which I can sort of sympathize with) at everything and everything.

In other words, this movie is like Spider Jerusalem (or just plain Warren Ellis) wrote the script as a joke. It feels like it should be satire, man. But it’s oh so serious. Which is just confusing.

Couldn’t find a better picture of Drift or Hound. Maybe it means someone is embarrassed about it?

Take, for instance, the weird dynamics between Cade, Irish Boyfriend, and Fabutanna Yaeger. It’s understandable, on a thematic level, that Cade has been the most important man in his daughter’s life and he has trouble letting go. I get that, being the father of a young (too close to teenaged already) girl. But instead of nurturing that idea and letting it be as simple and human as it could be, the movie milks it into this weird, creepy engine of shame. Shame for everyone. Irish Boyfriend is so ready for shame that he carries a card outlining his legal right to date a daughter in Texas. That’s correct, folks. You read that right. In this movie, ostensibly for kids, you have a character who proudly displays his documentation proving he can commit is usually considered statutory rape (but only by assholes, he’s 20 and she’s 17 so it’s not the end of the world folks).

You can’t make this shit up.

Speaking of Irish Boyfriend, he has to be one of the most wasted characters in Transformers history, which is really rife with this sort of shit. He shows up for a random hail mary save, waxes testosterone over the virtue of young, nubile Nectarine, and then does absolutely sweet fuck all for the rest of the movie. At least Cade has a character arc, going from well-meaning but shitty inventor to gun-toting anti-science Texan, but in a 2.5 hour movie they just couldn’t spare that kind of attention to anyone or anything else.

Lockdown is kind of cool, I guess.

Which brings me to the lore. One on level, the concept artists and VFX people are the only winners in the whole Transformers franchise. On another, their work is in service to one of the shallowest, most strip-mined IPs this side of Star Wars. This movie is so lazy that it has robot dogs, so someone somewhere is getting it wrong. There’s also the fucking KSI transformers and their ridiculously bad looking transformation effect. But more generally, there’s a bunch of garbled backstory and lore in this movie that is just pared down, as if Bay cut several longer expository scenes because they bored him and he just wants to get back to another Magic Hour shot of Wahlberg staring pensively at the American Flag.

What I’m saying is, there was time to explain what a “Knight of Terminus” is and why that matters. There was time to get a bit more into this idea that transformers were created, a total retcon of the established lore thus far by the way, and so on. The aliens we briefly see blowing up the dinosaurs in the opening of the film? Sequelbait. As goes Prometheus, so goes the great nation of monster trucks, Bud Lite, and alien gun swords.

My point here isn’t that I’m mad because Bay and Kruger misadapted or otherwise mangled the Tranformers IP. I personally could give a shit about that. My issue is that these guys should care about the internal consistency, logic, and salience of their own shit. This stuff is so thoughtless and throwaway in the movie that it saps everything that happens of any meaning or larger mythos it could have and should have had, being the kind of movie it is.

Easily the worst of the new Autobots. Statham-Bot.

Unlike the previous movies, Bay cares more here about the geography of his action scenes, the audience’s ability to decipher what’s happening on screen, and the logical necessities of the threadbare plot. There are few, if any, outrageously WTF moments in this movie on par with stuff like Optimus disappearing for 20 minutes or Bumblee teleporting around Chicago (both in Dark of the Moon) and Decpticons being copy/pasted around battle scenes (Revenge of the Fallen). The WTF is simultaneously more suppressed and more surreal this time.

This is also where the “at least this one didn’t…” comes in. Really, though, it’s like trying to decide which Justin Bieber song you like better. If you’re comparing the asshole of one dog to the asshole of another, you pretty much have to acknowledge at some level that what you’re talking about are dogs’ assholes.

You can dress it up, guys, but it is what it fucking is.

One of the most surreal things about Transformers: Age of Extinction is how political it is. I haven’t fully given up on the idea that Bay is a highly intelligent sociopath who perversely enjoys raking in untold riches by reflecting ‘Merica back on itself, but this movie really could have been workshopped by the Tea Party and/or the NRA. There’s so much belligerent, anti-intellectual Americana here that it bleeds red, white, and blue. It blows confetti across the very planet and rains down on you with Redbull and Creatine.

In many ways, Age of Extinction is remarkable for its ability to condense and express a kind of stereotypical American texture that should be at once recognizable to just about anyone in the world. Except there’s no shame here. There’s no “fuck we’re a bunch of assholes”. No way, sir. This is proud to be loud. This is no truer a representation of the United States than it is of China or Japan, and yet it embraces those shards of deep fried culture like it’s coming out of a food truck at lunch time.

I mean, everything from drone warfare to deep mistrust in government is here and playing on the same stage. Compare this to the first movie, where one of the main heroes is the Secretary of Defense backed by American GIs.

As a result of all these elements I describe, the Transformers franchise remains a deeply fascinating and utterly deplorable pop culture artifact. It’s the kind of stuff academics will only begin to process years from now. The kind of thing that makes us redefine what Bad Movie means and how to deal with it. Some think the Transformers movies should just be ignored, but those same people will and do pay to see them in theaters. For nerds, this is the equivalent of reading trashy celebrity magazines.

We just want to see the fucking carnage.

They’ve evolved.

I don’t think most people expected Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be as good as it was. It did have some rough spots, but all in all it’s a great counterexample for arguments, and there are a lot of them, that remakes are bullshit. Rise was a banner remake, changing the original lore in accessible ways and exploring an entirely different set of themes inspired by the original work.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel I think we’re generally all very happy to receive, does the same. Not that I think anyone needs to worry themselves being concerned about the continuity and lore of a 40 year old film franchise, but I think these movies are respectful, even reverent, of their source material. This is a rare quality and you can feel it, it’s palpable, when watching these movies. Makes for a different sort of reaction from the audience when they’re not strip-mining an old IP for shallow goo-gaws.

Getting past the fact that it’s both a great remake and a great sequel, Dawn‘s attention to detail, characterization, and themes are what makes it a great movie regardless of its context and pedigree. Somewhat contrary to how it was marketed, Dawn is less a “humans vs. apes” movie and more a complex, serious “first contact” story.

The hunting sequence, with its insider music cue, is stellar.

Ten years after Rise, the virus that Gen-Sys accidentally unleashed has wiped out most of humanity. It’s been years since Caesar’s colony of apes have seen any humans. While they’ve been in seclusion they’ve become a nation with sophistication around what we would consider Neolithic. They’ve created a settlement, mastered horseback riding, and become a society of hunters all in a way (depicted in an amazing, eerie scene) that is very reminiscent of what we think our own ancestors were like.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) remains the leader of the apes and his rule is a happy one. However, the “human question” remains unsolved. When they appear again, looking for a way to restore power to their own colony in San Fransisco, the question becomes the catalyst for the end of the apes’ idyllic innocence as a culture.

Caesar’s motivations are echoed by the primary human characters.

One of the best things about this movie is that it cares so much about all its characters, and has such great sympathy for all sides of the conflict, that no one really feels like a “bad guy”. Even Koba (Toby Kebbell), the de facto villain, only grows to that role over time as his fear and hate carry him past the point of no return, to a kind of madness that is at once horrifying and sympathetic. Likewise, Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) the human leader is like the opposite end of that coin. He’s afraid and ignorant, unable to accept the situation in front of him. He isn’t in the movie much, and way less a villain than the marketing may have suggested, but he similarly goes to desperate lengths out of very “human” motivations.

Koba starts off mistrusting the humans and worrying about Caesar because of his past hatred of them. When Caesar shames him for his rashness and hate, Koba recoils into those very emotions and twists his motives toward any justification, any act, to have an outlet for that fear and hatred. Koba therefore systematically becomes a villain and we watch it happen, step by step. It’s brilliantly done and keeps him sympathetic and understandable. Dawn is as much a tragedy as it is anything else, and its tragic elements are firmly rooted in character.

If only Malcolm had more time and influence, things could have gone a very different way.

On the other end of what is really an ideological conflict being expressed by this movie, Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Caesar forge a friendship out of mutual respect. They have a certain kinship as both are man trying to protect their families and both have a commitment to survival, peace, and prosperity. Malcolm doesn’t see the apes as enemies or rivals, but as a potentially friendly tribe of fellow survivors. The trouble is, both of these guys are do-gooders and sometimes there’s a blindness in that. People who trust can be betrayed by those who are too afraid or hateful to do the same, and that’s essential here because if you could boil this down to any one core theme, it’s that very loss of innocence that comes with realizing how vulnerable you are to others who might harm you for simply not seeing the world the same way.

All this argues for the complexity of this movie, where there are no moral absolutes, not even “Ape not kill ape”. This makes the story feel more genuine, more human, and more thoughtful than if it had adopted an “adventure epic” feel. It’s a “thinking person’s” genre movie, they’ll say.

There’s a lot of heart and humanity in this movie.

No CG creation has ever felt as lifelike as the apes in Dawn. It’s not just the quality of the mocap, or the verisimilitude of the effects, it’s that these characters are treated as people. That’s something you never get out of Tranformers, which doesn’t need it to quite this degree obviously, but could really stand to humanize the giant robots we’re supposed to care about. Anyway, this rather obvious approach to the apes means that they can fully occupy center stage of a movie like this and it works gangbusters.

I mean, more people applauded Dawn of the Planet of the Apes than did Transformers: Age of Extinction. There’s hope!

In some ways, it feels like Dawn is a proof of concept that not only can realistic CG characters carry a movie, but so can their culture, politics, and lore. This feels like a confident example of how hey, this can work, bring on the next movie where it’ll go even further. I know we’ll get that next movie. Dawn is going to not only be a financial success, but a critical one.

That’s awesome because it really feels like they’re building something here. And they’re getting there with ape politics, rudimentary though they may be. You just know there was push back on this, that someone somewhere tried to make sure the focus on the apes was minimized out of fear that audiences would not take this movie seriously. The approach Dawn ends up having is the only one that matters: make us care. This movie makes us care. It earned it on the back of Rise, and re-ups in the first five minutes. It earns that fucking applause.

Even though everything is Koba’s fault and terribly tragic, you can’t help but root for him just a tiny bit sometimes.

In case anyone is thinking this movie is all ape politics, don’t worry. There are two very awesome scenes of the apes laying a smackdown on humans. The first is symbolic, after one of Malcolm’s people shoots an ape out of fear. Caesar mounts a display of strength, letting the humans know who he and his people are and what they can do. They weren’t expecting armed, horse riding apes in warpaint. They weren’t expecting apes who can tell them off, either.

The second is the one in the trailers, where Koba manufactures a battle with the humans. This battle scene is incredible, showing in real time how the apes are both advantaged and disadvantaged when fighting experienced, armed humans. Even with guns, the apes do not know how to fight and have to learn literally on the spot. Koba’s ferocity is something else here, even though at this point he’s done enough bad things to be a bad guy. There’s this intense sequence where he’s riding a tank as the turret swivels, showing muralistic swaths of the battle as he becomes a source of inspiration and strength to the apes. This one scene is enough to justify all the apes who follow him even after he murders one, even after he goes full despot. On a purely cinematic level, this sequence stands out in an exceptionally well made movie, but it’s also the storytelling significance of it that sets it up as a wonderful example of why Dawn is so very good.

Maurice remains the best. The book they’re reading?Black Hole of all fucking things.

Like I said before, Dawn is more of a first contact story. It treats the tense, painful collision of ape and human cultures in much the same way as we might treat a story about European colonists having a confrontation with an indigenous tribe. We understand now that fear, mistrust, and past hatred have never served those encounters well and, despite the best efforts of some, drove serious and damaging conflict. It’s the same here. It’s not “humans are bad and apes are good”.

More than that, it ends with Caesar and Malcolm’s sad resignation that war is inevitable. Koba went too far, hurt the humans and apes (through the humans) too much for there to be any way back. That’s a pretty bold place to end things, but it also sets up the way the apes have to adapt from their innocence and try to become both mighty enough to survive and responsible enough to make survival worth it. In some ways, this feels like a retelling of our own origins, where perhaps our ancestors had similar chances to do things right and failed. The apes have the benefit of the human example, and watching too many humans not really committing to starting over and trying to do things better is a sobering aspect of the movie for audiences and is meant to show why the apes always choose their own way.

If Rise was the birth and Dawn is the childhood of their culture, I think we can expect the next film to focus on the trials and maturation of adolescence. Expect it to be rough. It’s interesting to point out that Caesar, as a character, is always a step or two ahead of that journey to maturity. This speaks to why the others follow him, why he commands respect and even deference even from humans. Caesar is a great character, full stop, and I could easily write at this length just about him.

Awww yeah.

Everybody a badass.

I waited forever for this movie to come out. It looked like a lean, mean action movie with a cast so unlikely that it just had to be great. Finally, the wait was over and I got to sit down and watch Sabotage and see not only if its weird cast panned out, but if it deserved the mixed and generally underwhelmed reviews that it received.

Whether or not you’re going to go for this movie or just find it kind of bland and familiar depends a lot on what kind of audience you are. Being that I prize a commitment toward objectivity (as close as I can get anyway) when writing criticism, it may seem strange for me to say that. But the truth is that, from the kinds of objective criteria by which I’d judge a film, Sabotage is maybe a notch above solid and I’ll tell you all about that in a bit. On the other hand, though, your mileage with this movie is going to depend a lot more on subjective stuff like how realistic you like your bullet wounds or how easily you buy these actors, their roles, and their antics.

For me, it’s all pretty easy and fun to get into. There’s a nice mixture of throwback and new hotness in Sabotage. There’s a wetness and realism to the violence that some may not appreciate. I definitely did. Sabotage is about as solid an R action movie as it gets these days. But it also has some social commentary and a lot of wit in a script that could have been leaner and less considerate. It’s not quite a “smart” movie, but Sabotage‘s dialogue and unpredictability may surprise you. Then again, this is a David Ayer film (End of Watch, Training Day) so maybe it won’t.

Sometimes dysfunctional, though.

Sabotage is about a team of DEA Agents united by a cowboy attitude and the ironclad will of one man, John “Breacher” Wharton (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Breacher is repeatedly referred to as “daddy” or as the symbolic father of his squad. This is no wonder as they are a bunch of unruly children, a modern day Wild Bunch in their own minds.

In one of the opening scenes, the team steals $10mil from a Mexican drug cartel. The money goes missing and no one knows who took it, but the DEA knows it was taken and strongly suspect Breacher and his team. They can’t prove anything, so they bench the team for six months until the investigation reaches the end of its lifespan. Then they start dropping dead, leaving Breacher to team up with a sarcastic, competent FBI detective Caroline (Olivia Williams), to suss out the who and why. Even though everybody is pretty sure the team is just paying for all that money in pounds of flesh, the sassy detective isn’t so sure and keeps pulling at threads until stuff comes loose. In this sense, there’s a bit of old fashioned detective story mixed in with the gritty modern cop movie.

Caroline don’t take shit.

Sabotage is at its best when its huge cast pairs off. The most unexpected and best of these are whenever Harold Perinneau and Olivia Williams are together. They get across years of casework and camaraderie in a few well-placed and entertaining exchanges. Williams really does stand out in this movie, playing off every other cast member with an engaging mix of bewilderment, nerve, and dry wit. Likewise, Mireille Enos is probably the other main stand out in her role as Lizzy, the team’s most aggressive and unpredictable member. Both play women who have carved their way into a traditionally male-dominated world, but the movie doesn’t draw attention to this. Instead, these are women who’ve already been there and done that and are past it, though its left marks.

The male cast is mostly made up of familiar faces doing small roles before they are killed off, almost horror movie style. Because Breacher’s team is pretty much a bunch of unrepentant assholes, the audience’s reaction to their deaths may also play much like in a horror movie where half the fun is seeing who gets dropped next (and how). That said, there are a few surprises beyond the aforementioned Perinneau (though he’s always solid). Sam Worthington, playing Monster the Aryan-styled husband to Enos’s Lizzy, gets to play against his character’s edgy appearance with a current of vulnerability and earnestness. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a great performance, but it rates as a solid chunk of character acting that may be what Worthington should have been doing all along.

Even this sequence is less outlandish and Hollywood than you might expect.

One of this movie’s other strengths, and I’d say this is an objective quality also, is that it skews toward realism, or authenticity if you like that better, in its action scenes. Breacher’s team feels like a real team of DEA doorkickers, adapting military tactics to the drug war. They call out instructions, coordinate their movements, and function the way you’d think such a team would. In most movies, such squads work together as if connected by telepathy, but it seems much more realistic that they’d call the plays to each other in much the same way as a sports team does.

Little details like that are appreciated, since Sabotage could easily have been a glossier and less impactful exercise.

Enos steals most of her scenes, showcasing a side of her skillset that fans of The Killing ain’t yet seen.

To the extent that Sabotage offers any social commentary, I’d say it fits into a general narrative of corruption in the lettered agencies and a more specific volley at the inherent dangers and problematic nature of the drug war. Though this isn’t an incisive indictment of America’s drug culture ala The Counselor, Sabotage‘s plot and punch rely completely on the understanding that it’s unclear whether Feds, kitted out for urban warfare and empowered to go pretty far in their mandate, are much better than the cartel soldiers they’re fighting. But like I say, the movie doesn’t really dwell on this so it feels a bit more like a piece of topicality snatched out of the air to build a story around.

And that story is really about one man’s ruthless pursuit of revenge. Sabotage is a movie that has a fair bit going on under the hood, and may have been something singular if it were more focused. Its ability to competently spin so many basketballs is part of its charm, though, I’d say. Take, for instance, that pursuit of revenge. With everything going on, it’s easy to forget the not so subtle hints we get that Breacher is running a different game, and his actions go together with those hints to form a bit of a rough sketch character study. Here’s a guy willing to use people, sacrifice people, for the sake of a pure and singular purpose that almost feels like it belongs to a different story. Indeed, the last scene is a bit of indulgence that feels somewhat at once discordant and perfectly in key with the rest of the film. Suddenly, Sabotage becomes a revenge Western complete with big fucking hats.

Poor Alcide.

Personally, I’m enjoying this resurgence in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career. I like that he’s playing closer to his actual age and assuming the role of patriarch, father, and general more often. Sabotage uses little of the charm he still very much has at his disposal, but it shows a lean and calculated side of his abilities, the rare time where he gets to act up some of the intelligence his appearance belies.

On the other hand, Sabotage has two of the best roles for actresses in the late 30′s to late 40′s age range this side of a Sandra Bullock movie and that counts for something too. I think it’s really great that a movie full of scenery-chewing macho men is completely owned by two women who get to show them up every second scene.

I don’t think that Sabotage is going to light anybody’s world on fire, but it’s a nice demonstration of Ayer’s continued commitment to solid cop movies with flashy but interesting casting. It’s also a nice demonstration that Schwarzenegger isn’t as old and tired as he may sometimes play up when a role calls for it. He’s still got the presence, physicality, and chops to bring it.

The opening sequence is excellent, weird, and sets the mood for the rest of the film.

Under the Skin is a peculiar movie. Many will seek it out for its promise of surrealism, science fiction, and ScarJo nudity. All will get what they’re looking for and then some.

Because it’s an evocative rather than narrative film, Under the Skin delivers story in only the most minimal of terms. Sparse on dialogue, visible conflict, and recognizable tropes, it may test the patience of those used to more conventional narrative techniques. There’s also that it’s what people generally call “slow”, though I usually reserve that for movies that ineffectively use tangents. As long as slower paced movie uses its pace effectively rather than thoughtlessly, I hesitate to use “slow” as a criticism. But in case a slow movie turns you off, there you go.

Under the Skin‘s merits are in its simplicity and commitment. The story is minimalistic and intensely focused, which is part of why the film can get away with being implicit almost all of the time. The commitment is really to concept, to its own weirdness and lack of exposition, and to its lead actress who has to carry the whole thing on her shoulders and tell us everything we need to know with body language, inflection in her sparse dialogue, and small facial tics we barely know we’ve seen. Because she’s up to this and because Under the Skin‘s simple story is actually very sad and beautiful, with interesting and occasionally spectacular visuals, the film as a whole is stirring and singular. One of those movies that people will love for the right reasons.

As much of her as the movie shows, it never feels gratuitous; the tone is always too clinical, too alien, or too intimate for that.

Scarlett Johansson is an unnamed alien in a young woman’s body. Alone, she stalks men and qualifies them for seduction and processing in specially chosen locations. These men, all of whom are chosen based on whether or not they’ll be missed immediately, are used for some unknown purpose. The evidence of what’s going on is carefully hidden by motorcycle-riding cleaners, presumably also aliens wearing human skin.

For much of its running time, the film settles into an episodic rhythm of the alien girl’s routine. Slowly, it becomes apparent that she’s changing as a result of what she’s been doing and seeing. This is shown, rather than told, and it’s pretty subtle. Because the movie is so deliberate and scenes usually last a while, it’s also hard to miss even for its subtlety. The turning point is actually a fairly dramatic scene on a beach, where the alien girl leaves a squalling infant behind after watching its parents drown. Later, the film’s eerie soundtrack recalls those cries as she looks at herself in her van’s rearview mirror.

The beach sequence and its aftermath are among the most memorable scenes.

Some have described Under the Skin as a movie about the preciousness of life, and an exploration of humanity. I’m not sure I fully agree as those descriptions seem somewhat trite. That said, Under the Skin is a very humane film in many ways and certainly deals with a realization of humanity. At first, the alien girl doesn’t care about human life and the audience is kept in the dark about what happens to the men she seduces. As the film progresses, we see more and more. There’s a symmetry here where in each scene of her drawing some man, seemingly in some kind of moth-like trance, she is more and more naked. Not as if it requires more nakedness to attract each man, but more as if she herself is exploring more and more of what she has become in a woman’s skin.

But this isn’t the only way the film is humane. There’s irony, also. When she meets a young man who is horribly disfigured, the alien girl treats him exactly the same way as she treats every other man. Like she can’t tell that he would be repulsive to most human women. This is ironic because she treats him better than probably anyone has ever treated him, literally because she can’t tell the difference. Luckily for him (at first), he’s also the first of her victims that she takes pity on and releases. This could indicate that she does recognize his difference from others, but I’d argue that it means the opposite. The statement here is more about how she has changed and it happens to coincide with ironically humane treatment of a man unlikely to receive much of that from other humans.

Adam Pearson actually has those facial deformities in real life.

After that, she’s on the run. Whatever she was doing, whatever her role and relationship in whatever is going on with these aliens (and they are definitely aliens), it’s now undone. This coincides with a kind of awareness of herself she has slowly been developing. She tries on the human skin, but it’s only after a while that she attempts to explore what’s underneath it. That may sound trite itself, but it fits and I suppose it does speak for the idea that this movie explores “what it is to be human”. Certainly its lead character does, and this leads her to interesting places.

More than this, there’s a point where we finally see what happens to the men as they are left in the inky black pool she draws them to. There’s a moment of recognition as one of the men, there much longer and beginning to desiccate, touches a newcomer. There’s revulsion mixed in with the recognition as the newcomer watches the first man die, his insides sucked away leaving only his skin. There’s so much humanity in that moment that the horror of their fate is a punch in the gut.

This moment is absolutely heartbreaking.

In trying to be human, the alien girl has successes and failures. Some are even comical, but it all ultimately leads to a tragic place. Up to a point, she’s seen facets of humanity that are kind or at least appealing to her, but it’s only at the very end that she sees the ugliness in us that perhaps she is rejecting among her own kind. A man in the forest tries to rape her and in doing so, reveals the creature underneath. Another irony is revealed her: the alien creature is beautiful. She is a kind of oily black, very humanoid, and sleek in a way humans aren’t. She isn’t sensual the way a human might find another human, but beautiful in a remote and unearthly sense. That said, her own horror as she stares at the blinking eyes of her human face is palpable and sad.

The rejection of her true form as the rapist wordlessly reacts to the unknown thing she represents (while also covering up his own crime) dovetails with her rejection of her kind. More irony.

I guess the theme of this review, if not the film itself, is irony. Under the Skin is based on a dark comedy, a book that is by all accounts so different from the movie that if you’re really curious about the details (like why the aliens take people) I’d actually suggest reading the synopsis on this one. The movie is a tone poem version, adapting the book the way a music video adapts a song. The thing it seems to preserve best, and be most interested in, is that sense of irony. Though Under the Skin never feels funny, it definitely evokes feeling. It’s tragic, sad, and strange and one of the best movies of 2014.

Johansson effortlessly evolves the character from sociopathic to sympathetic.

This movie does a lot with a little in terms of production.

A no-budget British science fiction film, Frequencies (also called OXV: The Manual) is a surprisingly ambitious and self-assured piece of filmmaking and storytelling.. Starting with a quantum mechanics infused story of unlikely love and eventually treading ground much deeper and more interesting, Frequencies is steeped in fundamental philosophical and social inquiry and thought. Most fundamental of all is perhaps the question of causality versus free will, a deeply affecting question that the majority of people are very uncomfortable facing. Are we free agents able to actually make decisions and affect outcomes thereby? Or are we automatons living out the product(s) of infinitely complex causal equations that render everything determined.

On the face of it, Frequencies operates with a narrow, potentially hokey concept that quickly builds on itself to encapsulate a movie-as-thought experiment. It’s the way that it commits to the concept and carries it off into surprising and yet logical places that makes this movie special. This movie feels made for me, in some ways, but I’m willing to bet I can make a case for why others should give it a look.

It’s quite a dense bit of work from writer-director Darren Paul Fisher. I feel like he might be the UK’s answer to Shane Carruth and I hope he doesn’t wait as long to make another film!

Zak and Marie orbit each other, but is it circumstance or design?

Much like in an Andrew Niccol movie, the world of Frequencies is pretty much the same as the one we know except that scientists have managed to measure and quantify a form of cosmic luck they call “Frequency”. Those with high frequencies tend to get everything they want out of life, as if the universe itself bends and reforms to accommodate them. On the other hand, those with low frequencies have bad luck, bad timing, and low status.

This potent concept seems tailor-made for a story about classism, but that is only one of the themes Frequencies explores. Mostly, this is more a story about the problems with both determinism and free will. It winds up being remarkably even-handed with how different approaches and philosophies can affect people, and how they may all be equally legitimate in the context of a universe that doesn’t care whether we see chaos or order.

Most of the film focuses on Zak (Daniel Fraser), named for Isaac Newton, a kid with an exceptionally low frequency. He has a crush on Marie (Eleanor Wyld), named for Marie Curie, who has an exceptionally high frequency. With the help of his friend Theo (Owen Pugh), named for Theodore Adorno, Zak spends his life conspiring to raise his frequency and win the affections of Marie, with whom he can’t spend more than a minute without their creating probability events that are potentially dangerous. This could be a very twee and cute formula, but it’s played with a straight hand and sort of a clinical detachment. There are no manipulative music cues or anything like that, simply the observation of moments. This is infused with a kind of anticipation, which I think is intended to feel a bit like we’re studying these people. Like we’re the scientists. This feels appropriate.

As the movie unfolds, we see things from first Marie’s perspective, then Zak’s, and finally Theo’s. Every scene creates more clues for the audience to tie it all together.

Marie’s problem is an example of what it would be to be a perfectly rational being.

Marie’s issue is that her high frequency leaves her devoid of empathy. She is curious about Zak and drawn to him, but can never return his love. Zack and Theo’s experiments eventually yield a way for Theo to counteract the destructive results of his sharing space with Marie. Using special words that seem to redirect the “waves” of frequency and remake the world, as Zak’s theories (a mixture of quantum uncertainty and the power of positive thinking that should sound like Deepak Chopra bullshit but feels right in this universe) suggest. With this, he and Marie can achieve a kind of balance between his bad luck and her unasked for sociopathic personality. With Zak she comes alive and for a while, things are good.

In a romantic comedy, the next thing to happen would be some kind of unexpected hitch that drove the couple apart only for them to renew their love by the end. That is sort of what happens, actually, but it’s so much more interesting and earned than in a romcom. For one thing, it isn’t as formulaic here because it’s tied completely into the mechanism of the frequencies and the shadowy world of the government scientists and secret societies who are disrupted by Zac and Theo’s discovery of the secret language.

Permeating all of the fantasy science in this movie, there’s a systematic processing of ideas and possibilities we should examine more closely.

The words are actually commands, penetrating deep into the brains of the people who hear them and altering their frequencies by altering their perceptions of the world. In this world, belief in the frequencies is enough to make them real. So is belief in a lot of other things, as Tobias seems to discover while conning and experimenting on everyone else in the movie.

The fact that his special words actually force people to do what he says gets Zak into hot water with the government and with Marie. Is her love real, or does she love Zak because he put the idea in her head with an especially persuasive magic word? This stuff is taking aim directly at our normative concepts of love and choice and asking the big, uncomfortable questions about the truth in what we know and what we feel.

The end leaves all the characters in different places. When Zak’s rediscovery of the language, called “the technology”, forces the government’s hand, it also pits Zak against Theo in the pursuit of the truth. Zak learns that Theo and his father, who once showed Zak a great deal of kindness, are the inheritors of a secret legacy. That legacy is the knowledge that music, especially certain kinds, is the inherent antidote to the effect produced by the technology. This is the same sort of “language is a virus” stuff present in other works of fiction like the book Snow Crash or the movie Pontypool, but with a neuro-deterministic basis.

With this discovery come cool, amusing scenes like a psychologist prescribing music like pills. Things like this are completely consistent with the web of ideas that Frequencies builds over its running time. The climax is a liberation from the technology, leaving Marie and Zak free to see if their love works without it. They, being intelligent people, ponder the implications and whether or not what they feel is really real, given that Theo has been monitoring and influencing nearly everything in his quest to, well, understand it all.

Things take their toll on poor Zak, who is conditioned to follow his own instincts toward free will over the determinism represented by Theo.

At the end, Marie and Zak’s rejection of determinism’s effect on their feelings flies in the face of Theo’s final conversation with his father. Theo, puffed up with the understanding and foresight his simulations have given him, acts coldly in his final demonstration of determinism and its promise of knowledge, power, and control. He thinks it does matter, and this is what it’s turned him into. He’s not quite a mad scientist, but there’s something incredibly creepy and sociopathic about his behavior by this point. Even his intonation is devoid of human feeling, much to Pugh’s credit. I don’t think Frequencies is saying that being a determinist will make you a sociopath, but it’s hinting that way and leaving the audience to decide whether they buy it. Likewise with Zack and Marie who may seem naive and stupid by rejecting the questions and embracing the emotional reality of their connection in spite of its dubious origins. They have an experience of being in love, a phenomenology of that, and they choose this over a reductive truth.

Frequencies doesn’t reject a deterministic universe. Its world is certainly deterministic whether Zak and Marie notice or not. This is precisely the point its making about our world as well. In the movie, reductionism and phenomenology are treated as equally (potentially) valid. The movie holds up both scenarios as a mirror to the viewer, hoping they will see something of themselves and perhaps reflect on their own awareness of what they do and why. This is the brilliance of Frequencies. It encourages this type of thinking without trivializing it. Its speculative universe, created as a thought experiment to ponder determinism, gives us a chance to model our thinking and see what shakes out. This makes Frequencies an eminently philosophical film, of a kind infrequently (pun intended) available to the average audience.